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Look for URLs that begin
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t
122
The McCain Mutiny
Senator John McCain was the
lone GOP dissenter to the
1 996 Telecommunications Act.
He hates telecom lobbyists,
* wants to auction broadcasters'
spectrum, and thinks crypto
policy can be brokered Oh,
and he's now the chair of the
Commerce Committee, which
oversees telecom policy.
By Todd Lappin
130
In the Zone
They could have been recruited
in the gyms of the best engi¬
neering schools. The techno-
jocks at Starwave have created
a unique culture - and made
ESPNET SportsZone the
Number One destination site
on the Web,
The Netizen:
Telco Terrorism
ff the Baby Beffs get their way,
you'll pay by the minute and
through the nose for the priv¬
ilege of logging on. But the
Net has an unlikely defender:
the FCC.
By Declan McCullagh
124
F/Xtravaganzas
A preview of this summer's
big special effects movies.
By Paula Parisi
114
101 Ways to Save Apple
Cover:
Concept by John Plunkett
llfustation byTony Klassen
Latin translation courtesy
of Reverend David T. Stark
lntroductlon:The Attfk
Rants & Raves Reader feedback
134
Breeding Edge
Using an SGI lndigo2 and
his own genetic algorithms,
Steven Rooke breeds fantas¬
tical Tolkienesque landscapes
- literally.
By Jackie Rennion
136
From Bedroom
to Big Time
This January, musician Jyoti Mishra
-aka White Town - recorded
"Your Woman" in his bedroom using
an old multitrack Tascam and an
Atari, Four weeks later, it entered
the UK charts at Number One.
By Daniel Pemberton
138
The Great Firewall of China
At ISPs, Internet cafes, even state censorship committees, we meet the wired of
China- We discover that the technology China needs to build the most powerful
country on earth in the 21st century threatens to undermine the institutions that
rule the nation. And Beijing's control freaks are worried.
By Geremie R. Barme and Sang Ye
32
41 Electric Word Bulletins from the front line
of the Digital Revolution
59 Fetish Technolust
67 Scans People, companies, and ideas that matter
78 Reality Check The future of dentistry
80 Raw Data Stats 'R' Us
82 Geek Page Content-based image retrieval
86 Follow the Money Telecom calls
88 Deductible Junkets Beyond the brain
90 Updata ALA takes on the CDA, NAB puts the
brakes on HDTV, AO L is still not DQA...,
92 Cyber Rights Now Critical mess. _
June 1 997
ELECTROSPHERE
94 Name-o-rama™ By Alex Frankel
100 Speak the Future
By Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker
I D E E 5 FORTES
109 In Vitro Veritas By Nathan Myhrvold
110 Memes: The Creative Spark
By Liane M. Gabora
1 S3 Street Cred
157 Just Outta Beta
165 Net Surf
150
Hands off Hong Kong
By Louise Nameth
184 Nicholas Negroponte
Ever since the day you first wrapped your
fingers around a crayon, you’ve been driven
by the need to create. The way you create,
however, has changed beyond recognition. Or
at least beyond Mom and Dad’s recognition.
Apple" Macintosh" computers have always
understood people who create. In the words
of ID. Magazine, “The designer-friendly
quality that characterizes the Mac is deep in
the machine!’ Now, with our newest Power
Macintosh’ lineup, it’s even deeper.
We understand your need for speed.
The faster your computer, the more time you
have to experiment. That’s why we created
the Power Mac* 9600/200MP with dual
PowerPC processors. It blows away a PC
with dual Pentium* Pro processors running
Windows NT"* In fact, Adobe’Photoshop runs
50% faster on a PowerMac!* Which translates
into 50% less time staring at your screen and
waiting for your computer to finish retouch¬
ing photos, manipulating images or applying
filters. Valuable time you could be spending
actually doing all those things.
We understand your need for flexibility.
Some days you need to add memory. Some
days, an expansion card (or diree). With
a Power Mac 8600 or
9600 you won’t need
an MIS person, or even
a screwdriver to do it.
Push a button and they
open up simply and
gracefully, placing the logic board at your
fingertips. So you can do what you need to
do and get back to doing what you love.
We understand vour need to see how
graphics will look in Windows.
Now you don’t have to go out and buy a PC
just to see how web sites and graphics you’ve
created on a Mac* will look in Windows! Just
add a 166 MHz Pentium PC compatibility
card, and your Power Mac can run Windows
95 or Windows 3-1 applications. You can also
access a Windows network and exchange
files with clients and other less fortunate
folks who happen to use Windows.
For an even better understanding of the
computers that understand you, visit us at
www.powermacintosh.apple.com. Or call
us at 800-538-9696 for foe name of the
Power Mac reseller nearest you. And then, if
you haven’t lately, call your mother.
www.powermacintosh .apple.com
Jeff Bezo<
CEO AND FOUNDER
amazon.com
The world's largest
online bookstore.
The Internet: all potential, no performance, right? With a company growing at 5,000% per
year, JeffBezos couldn’t disagree more. He’s CEO and founder of Amazon.com, the world’s
largest, most prosperous on-line bookstore. “The Internet can help you gain—
or lose-lots of customers very quickly ,” says Jeff. So he hooked up with
Digital. “You need a computer company with real experience helping people do business
on the Net,” he says. “It’s also nice that Digital has the world’s widest range of high-
performance servers.” “The Internet can mean At Amazon.com, two
the fast lane
Digital AlphaServer™ for your business or the 8400s (ideal for high-
growth corporations) highway to hell — run the company’s
all depends on who you hook up with
99
crucial on-line electronic commerce systems, plus its entire range of back-office
and financial apps. Fact is, Digital has blazing servers, network components,
proven expertise, plus world-class AltaVista™ Internet software. Whatever it
takes to make Internet profits a lot less virtual. To make the Digital edge your
own, call 1-800-DIGITAL, ext. 278. Orvisitwww.ads.digital.com/highway.
Whatever it takes.s>
©1997 Digital Equipment Corporation. Digital, the DIGITAL logo, AlphaServer and AltaVista are trademarks and Whatever it takes is
a service mark of Digital Equipment Corp. All other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
P
Media 100®xs with HDRfx." It’s unreal.
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Executive Editor: Kevin Kelly
Deputy Editor: John Battelle
Creative Directors: John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr
Managing Editor: Puss Mitchell
Assistant Managing Editor: Jackie Bennton
Features Editors: Peter Leyden, James Daly, Spencer Reiss
Associate Editor: Kristin Spence
Section Editors: Amy Johns, Jessie Scanlon, Tim Barkow,Todd Lappin
Staff Editor: William O. Gog gins
Copy Edrtors; Kristine Kern, Mark Nlchol
Research Associates: Michael Behac Heidi Kriz
Intelligent Agent: Jesse Freund
Editorial Assistants: Ted Roberts, Anne Speedie
Interns: Julie Sullivan (Research), Bill Brazeil (Edit), Rachel Lehmann Ha upt
(Writing)
Ed itor-at-Large: Katrina Heron
Contributing Editors: Colin Berry (Music], John Browning (Europe),
John Heilemann (National Affairs), Bob Johnstone, Jon Katz (Media),
Bernie Krisher (Asia), David Pescovitz (Reality Check), Steve G Steinberg
Contributing Writers: John Perry Barlow, Thomas Bass, Jvan Berger, Stewart
Brand, Gareth Branwyn,Po Bronson, Douglas Coupland, David Diamond
Esther Dyson, Simson Garfinke I, William Gibson, Mike Godwin, Jeff Greenwah
Fred Hapgood, Joi I to (Japan), Ja ron Lanier, Andrew Leonard, Jacques Leslie,
Steven Levy, Pamela McCorduck, Brack N. Meeks, Oliver Morton. Phil Patton,
Charles Platt, Joshua Quittner, Jef Raskin, fiudy Rucker, Paul Saffo, Michael
Schrage,Evan I. Schwartz, Peter Schwartz, John Shirley, R. LL Sirius, Burr
Snider, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Rogier van Bake!, Gary Wolf
Senior Columnist: Nicholas Negroponte
Design Director: Thomas Schneider
Senior Designers: Paul Donald, Eric Courtemanche
Designer: Barbara Radosavljevic
Photo Editor Erica Ackerberg
Photo Associate: Jennifer Butler
Contributing Artists: Erik Adigard, Glenn Bair, Lou Beach, Jeff Brice, Michael
Crumpton, Paul Davis, Georganne Deen, Giles Dunn, Stan Gazjohn Hersey,
Tony Klassen, Jim Ludtke, Scott Menchin, Nick Philip, Rob Silver, Steve Speer
Contributing Photographers: Steve Double, Gabor Ekecs/Paul Elledge,Wil|iar
Faulkner, Aaron Goodman, Jill Greenberg, Thomas Heinser, John Wesley
Lemon, Norman Mauskopf, David McGlynn, Karen Moskowitz, Sylvia Plachy,
James Porto, Da niela Schmid, Klaus Schoen wiese, Neil Selkirk, Chip Simons,
Kim Strlngfellow, Eric Tucker, Will van Overbeek, Bill Zemanek
Production Art Director: Eugene Mosier
Production Artists; Kristin Burkart, Van Burnham
Prepress Specialist: Brad Brace
Production Coordinator: Tom Claburn
Assistant to the Creative Directors: Adrienne Ellis
De si g n Adm inistrati ve Assl sta nt: Ca roly n Ra uch Intern : Marc Contreras
Wired News
Executive Producer: Chip Bayers
Senior Producer; Martha Baer
Producer: Emily Tucker
Executive Editor: Kevin Kelleher
Managing Editor: Pete Danko
Associate Managing Editor: Cheryl Downes
Section Editors: Dan Brekke, Alexandra Huneeus
Wire Editor: Dan Mitchell
Designer: Eric Eaton
Lead Engineer: Sean Welch
Production Manager: Grace Woo
Wired Online: Roderick Simpson, Bob Parks
TLC: Ian Baecht, Philip Ferrato,
Ratka Popovic, William Stample
Coach: Charlie Jackson
Patron Saint; Marshall McLuhan
"AIJ advertising
advertises
advertising/
Wired Ventures Inc.
Chief Executive Officer: Louis Rossettc
President; Jane Metcalfe
Executive Assistant to CEO: Adam Messner
Executive Assistant to President: Hare C Lee
Administrative Assistants: Trade Tun nell, Christine Boepple
Chief Financial Officer: Jeff Simon
Vice President, Corporate and Business Development: Bex Q. Ishibashi
Vice President and Chief Technology Officer; Jacquard W. Guenon
■-■1997 Wired Magazine Group Inc, All rights reserved.
Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
Wired (ISSN 10590028) is a publication of Wired Ventures Inc,
Printed in the USA.
In Canada, International Marl Agreement #0501727
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w >
Ned knows he con book o flight
from o computer
Bob knows from his computer
he con book a flight (and earn up to
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what movie is playing, manage his
AAdvantage account, check out special
AAdvantage promotions and low
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of flight information and learn
interesting facts most humans don't
know about airplanes. For instance,
did you know a Boeing 757 has a
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times that of the average pterodactyl?
Bob did.
So what does Bob know that you and Ned
don't, besides the wingspans of extinct creatures?
He knows about Access"- the American Airlines
Interactive Travel Network", available on the web
and with Personal Access' software.
With AAccess, you can do everything from
planning trips and purchasing tickets, to checking
flight schedules and information, to keeping track
of your AAdvantage travel awards program miles, (
from flights, hotel stays and rental cars, as well as
award levels. All from your computer. And right
now, you can earn up to 500 bonus miles with
every Lrip you book on-line and complete by the
end of the year.
So why let Bob have all the fun? Visit Access
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American Airline* an tl AAdvanr u^e arc registered trademarks, and Net SAAver Fares, AAccess, American Airlines Interactive Travel Network. Ptensonal AAccess and AAcfeto via llx-Wcb ;liv iradcmaiks, irf American Airlines, Jm'.Artlcriciri Airlines: reserve*
Ihe right Hi change AAdvantage program miles, regulations, travel awards and special offere at any time without notice, and lo end <hc AAdvartliijjr program will] sHX motillw IWtleC 'flr'INjHlWS ft a revered trademark <>( Mli-rosaft Corporation.
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WDR
Editor/Publisher: Louis Rossetto
President: jane Metcalfe
Vice President: Dana Lyon
Associate Publisher: Drew Schutte
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ABC Audited, ^
Kiki Stockhammer
Play's Technology Evangelist
Aefua/ Snappy Grab From Video
Plug the pocket «sized
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Transistor Radio Home VCR CD-ROM WebTV What’s next?
Subscription information subscriptions@wired.com
Rants & Raves rants@wired.com
Editorial guidelines gu i del in es@wired. com
Editorial correspondence editor@wiredxom
Net Surf contributions surf@wired.com
WiredWare (T-shirts, et cetera} ware @ivf red.com
The most efficient way to reach us at Wired is via email. Some addresses, such as guidelines@wired.com or mfo-rama@wired.com.
will bounce back text, freeing us human types to create the next issue of Wired, Advertising sa les advertising@wired.com
Press releases editpress@wired.com
General questions info@wired.com
Push Overs _ _
Although the advent of push/pull technology
("Pushr Wired 5.03) is exciting, I foresee one prob¬
lem; content, or lack thereof.
I'm certain that technology can offer walls that
are video screens, cigarettes that broadcast soft drink
jingles, and toothbrushes that display stock prices.
1 am less certain of high tech media's ability to push
anything interesting into my lap, The comparison to
television exemplifies my point. I have access to so
many channels but can't find anything interesting
to watch.
The problem Is that high tech companies will pay
six-figure salaries to hundreds of software and hard¬
ware engineers but will spend only a fraction of that
to hire writers, artists, and
photographers.
Lucien Janik Jr,
turnip@jersey.net
Push applications make perfect
sense in the many ways you
described. But without multi¬
cast you are shoving - not push¬
ing - the traffic down the Net,
Push applications transmit
content via unicast - each
viewer receives a distinct data-
stream. As a result, the size of
a sender's network pipe deter¬
mines the number of receivers
It can accommodate and sucks
bandwidth from networks with
multiple listeners. Since many
receivers want the same data,
these limitations and adverse affects are unnecessary,
A better technology would allow the sender to
transmit a single datastream, which the network
would distribute to receivers on request .That's exactly
how multicast works.
Bob Quinn
rcq@sockets.com
Push media is a pox on the Web and must be eradi¬
cated at all costs!
The push model grabbed the attention of Internet
publishers because it allows them to dispatch infor¬
mation without depending on users to visit their
sites. Of course, you and I both know the real reason
these Internet publishers aren't getting visitors -
their content sucks and people don't want what they
have to offer. Publishers aren't willing to accept that
low traffic might be their problem. So what do they
do? These oh-so-thoughtful publishers force thenv
selves on us and ram their worthless information
right down our pipelines.
There are so many reasons why push media is
wrong, wrong, wrong, but I'll focus on one: push
media is old media! Internet publishers, who couldn't
figure out how to work this crazy thing called the
Web, have reverted to a tired (but manageable)
publishing model. Push media is just mass media
delivered to your desktop.
Remember when we first saw the Web, when we
dreamed of a revolution in communication, media,
and perhaps even human consciousness? Remember
the many-to-many publishing model? Remember
the democratic free flow of information? If we allow
push media to become the status quo, we can kiss
our Web dreams good-bye. We will lose the oppor¬
tunity to revolutionize the way we connect. We will
submit ourselves once again to the mind-controlling
forces of massive media companies who tell us what
they waru us to know, not what we want to find out.
The Web is not a one-way medium!
Julie Petersen
thkkjesus@awaken.org
I read (pulled, then pushed) with interest your cover
story on push media and was shocked by one little
paragraph on page 17."Foremost is relief from bore¬
dom/ It begins, and includes the fragmenf'the soli¬
tude of a country walk/ It's hard enough to walk
along a country road and not find a billboard (ambi¬
ent push), a candy wrapper, or a soda can (both non-
intentional push).To suggest that what we need on
that country walk is pushed news broadcasts, pullable
icons identifying tree species, and statistics on pedes¬
trian accidents in Bumble County is a crock of roadkill.
As media (both push and pull) become more “ubiq¬
uitous, "you're going to find me taking more walks In
the "boring" country to get away from the millions
of voices that will apparently be
storming my consciousness. HI
be leaving my PDA (pull) and
maybe even my road map (ambi¬
ent pull) behind.
Brian Hollenbeck
grayson@frontiemet.net
A constant barrage of advertis¬
ing already comes at me through
my television, radiotelephone,
browser, newspaper, and even
my email box. Now you want it
to follow me around everywhere
I go? It sounds like a recipe for
hell on earth.
The Web is a success because
It provides Information to users
and doesn't pander to advertis¬
ers. Television is a vast wasteland
of useless predigested mush because the people run¬
ning it put commercial interests before those of the
viewers. If push media Is going to follow the model
of television, It's going to be a big waste of time.
Isaac Freeman
ljf16@csc.canterbury.ac.nz
Wired-Rimmed Glasses
It amuses me when people rant about digerati-biased
articles in this publication. Do these same people
write to Rush Limbaugh to complain about the con¬
servative bent of his commentary? I read Wired cover
to cover every month to get its unique perspective
on current events, technology, and culture. It's a peek
WIRED JUNE 1 9 97 02
IMAGfc: I. TflAPPE
What’s next is now.
We developed die CD.
Which changed the way we listen to music.
But the DVD will change much more.
Like the way we watch movies.
Listen to multichannel sound.
Even enjoy our computers.
One single DVD disc (which looks just like a CD)
can store a full-length motion picture in digital surround sound.
Taking home theater to a new level.
Not to mention, new places.
Because someday, you’ll be able to watch DVDs on the go,
and on a computer, too.
Plus, our DVD video player will also play your music CDs.
Our DVD-ROM drive will play your CD-ROMs.
We thought you’d like the digital world.
Digital Dream Kids
www, sony. com / cl ectr o nics
rlW7 Sony Elicit win;." lot, Rciprikluruari m whole or eii part wrtkiut utjeu-il permimim t* ptuhiijawd All rights reeved.
S yny, Randyeuri. Willcrnau. Jiid Trinitron. art itudenturJt* of Sony. WebTV is * inidemark nfWt'hTV Swsrwwks, Inc.
RANTS & RAVES
at the world through digital-tinted glasses. For main¬
stream coverage, try CNN.
Scott C.Hill
schill@byteland.com
Sleazebag
I read the article on Steve Newman ("Would You Buy
Brooklynbrldgexom from This Man?" Wired 5.03, page
50) with unbridled revulsion. Newman epitomizes
everything that the Net should not be. Hell sell you
a domain name like maserati.net while assuming no
responsibility whatsoever for copyright infringements
-can you say "sleazebag"?
I have been using the Internet since it was the
Arpanet, and I marvel as much as anyone at the tech¬
nological and societal changes the technology has
wrought I also marvel at the carpetbaggers and
snake-oil salespeople who have crawled out from
under their electronic rocks.
Sor Steve Newman wants to sell gratefuldead.org
for US$5,000? I'l l do him one better I just registered
grateful-dead.org (a little more readable) and I'll give
It to any Deadhead who wants to set up a Dead
Web site for $100 - exactly what I paid for It.fiftb-
avenue.org? waltstreet.org? digitakimes.com? I'll
undercut Steve just for spite.
May the Steve Newmans of this world suffer bit
rot and leave the Net to those of us who will benefit
from it (and not just profit by it).
Pan Klein
dan@klein.com
Overrated and Inconsequential
The Telecommunications Reform Act is the most
overrated and Inconsequential law enacted by the
104th Congress ("The Great HDTV Swindle," Wired
5.02, page 57). Until I can purchase cable TV from the
local phone company - GTE - here in Elkhart, Indiana,
Instead of the mediocre monopolyTCU will not be
convinced that the 1996 act is anything but a pop¬
ulist ploy.
The FCC, Congress, the US Justice Department, and
state governments should be using their bully pulpits
to encourage the regional local-access telephone
operating/exchange companies to compete against
TCI for the lucrative right to purvey the passive cable
TV signal. TCI has not proven that it can satisfactorily
deliver cable TV, so how In cyberspace is the company
going to handle the more difficult task of interactive
fiber-optic Internet access? The superior technology
of regional phone companies will soften America's
transition from analog to digital HDTV by maintain¬
ing the dual-TV signal conveyance system that TCI
is opposed to.
I see TCI as a more dangerous monopoly than Ma
Bell ever was. The government should consider divid¬
ing up the listless cable conglomerate into seven
firms, which could be bought at fire-sale prices by the
probable hybrid telecom firms of Nynex/Bel! Atlantic/
AT&T/Pacific Teles is/Southwestern Bell, et cetera.
Terry DeShone
Elkhart, Indiana
A Broadcast to India
Certain Indian officials might want to expel foreign
broadcasting (' Caught in the Waves," Wired 5,03,
page 54), but then again, certain US officials might
want to ban the Internet. What matters is how these
desires translate Into policy.
I reported for Wired News that the Indian broad¬
casting laws currently under consideration try to
restrict foreign ownership of companies broadcast¬
ing from within India - not satellite broadcasters
such as STAR TV, which beams into India from Hong
Kong. In the most recent draft legislation, the limit
on foreign ownership Is 49 percent for direct owner¬
ship and 74 percent for indirect - far more than the
25 percent permitted by US law.
In fact, this "restriction" will actually be a libera¬
tion. Currently, only the Indian government can
broadcast (uplink) from within India. Now private
companies will have that right, too.
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh
rshab@dxm.org
Doomslayer Slayer
When I finished the article about Julian Simon and
his one-man crusade to induce us all to put our heads
in the sand ("The Doomslayer," Wired 5. 02, page 136),
I headed for some of Simon's primary sources. A half-
hour of perusing the Statistical Abstract of the United
States found no support for the claim that "from
1980 to 1990, known crude oil reserves increased by
50 percent "The Energy Information Administration's
US, Crude Oil; Natural Gas , and Natural Gas Liquids
Reserves Annual Report listed "known crude oil
reserves" at 29.8 billions of barrels in 1980 and at
263 billions of barrels in 1990. Needless to say, I was
surprised by this factual inconsistency in an article
about "Mr. Data "
Regardless of the accuracy - or inaccuracy - of
the facts Simon states, what is most compelling are
the ones he falls to mention, such as the steady,
documented rise In atmospheric carbon dioxide
concentrations over the last 50 years.
Emma C Farmer
McKinleyville, California
Nkkeless Negroponte
I remain baffled by the relentless quest of Nicholas
Negroponte and friends to attach microvalues to
everything digital ("Pay Whom Per What When, Part
II," Wired 5.03, page 220). In virtually every situation
Negroponte described, it's not at all difficult to
develop a payment scheme that doesn't require
micro payments.
04
Why should I pay a nickel every time i reach for
a piece of armor in a game? Why inflict that com¬
plexity on the system? Rather, let me pay for the
game by the minute. Place a minimum charge on
playing, If need be.
TheTyson-HoIyfield fight was priced as it was
because of a simple fact: the last Tyson fight - which
cost US$50 on pay-per-view - lasted less than one
raundTo the once-burned fans, pay-per-round made
excellent sense and still does.
Bid-and-offer systems for things such as tele¬
phone calls, while interesting and valuable In many
ways, also have no need for a new micropayment
system. So why does Negroponte continue to tell
us we need it?
W. D. Baseley
wbaseley@postoffice.ptd.net
NC: No Clue
I noticed two undereducated digs at the NC,or net¬
work computer, in the February Issue ("NC: New Cen¬
tralism?" Wired 5.02, page 123; Hype List, page 180).
A misstatement in the first article -"Yanking expen¬
sive PCs and replacing them with cheap NCs will save
companies a lot of money, But the cost of innovation
will be high" - misses a major point The NC is not
meant to replace the PC It's an Internet device.The
NC provides Net access to those unable to maintain
and configure the ever-complicated desktop PC.
PCs are powerful devices with one major function:
to create and edit digital Information. A PC is like a
television studio: a factory for creating content. Why
should a consumer of digital Information be required
to buy a PC? That would be like requiring TV viewers
to purchase a television studio.
PCs have not found a stronghold in public schools,
libraries, and other poorly funded public Institutions
because they are too complex and the knowledge
needed to keep them running is too expensive. What
is needed is a simple device with an intuitive user
Interface that allows people access to the informa¬
tion they want, without the hassle of having to know
the inner workings of the technology. The NC Is more
than a burned-out buzzword or a dumb terminal.
It is a simple solution to a complex problem: bring¬
ing networked information to the masses.
Michael Eichler
meichlerofcmail@rnteroffice.net
Fact and Fiction
It had been a long time since a piece of journalism
absorbed me as much as Po Bronson's "Building the
VW of PCs" (Wired 5.03, page 156). I was astonished
by Bronson's clarity as he perceived the motivations
of the engineers at La Honda. "Man, he must have
done his homework to get such a handle on the
dynamics of the group,"! remember thinking. And
wow! What a great saga. Who wouldn't be enthralled
WIRED JUNE 1997
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RANTS & RAVES
by a group of quirky engineers running amok at a
backwoods oasis of creativity?
It wasn't until I went to the Web site to scare up
Bronson's email address that I realized - oh! - it's
fiction.Too bad: as an article, this story was darn close
to inspirational*
Aaron VanderWal
avanderw@eddie.ris*uoguelph*ca
Warez Wary
The estimate of the dollars lost from software pirates
given in "Warez Wars" (Wired 5.04, page 132) is over¬
inflated. US$291,5 million a week ? Prove it*
At a recent lecture I attended, some software
industry guru held up a CD-ROM and claimed that
it could be purchased in China for about $20 but had
well over $20,000 worth of programs on it. He then
claimed that billions of dollars per year were lost
due to piracy. Whooaa. After the lecture, I asked
whether in calculating this biflion-dollar number,
the organization counted the evil disk as $20 or
$20,000 in lost profits. It had used the bigger number,
arguing that consumers might have actually spent
the 20 grand. What?!
When M ichael, the "warez junkie/' downloads
$50,000 worth of software, the industry is not losing
$50,000 in real money. Would he have spent $50,000
on the legal software? If the answer is no - and I bet
it is - then the software industry hasn't lost a penny.
Frank Golding
fgolding@ridioneil.com
In setting up the warez issue as a battle between the
anarchistic, profit-motiveless pirates and the stuffy,
horrifi ed - by-t h e-{p roba bl y exag g e ra te d ) -p rofi t - 1 oss
software developers, the article missed a key point.
Who really loses from the proliferation of warez?
As a legitimate user of NewTek's Lightwave 3D,
I'm paying considerably more for this software than
I would otherwise have to, because of the amount of
time and energy that NewTek has to devote to copy-
protecting its software, not to mention the additional
profit it builds in to cover the losses it will incur from
piracy. As in any war, it's the innocent bystanders
who usually suffer the most.
John Prusinski
iprusins@cybergrafix.com
1 usually enjoy your magazine and its cutting-edge
material, but this time you went too far. Wired has a
reputation for being not so smart when it comes to
the Internet and computing underground, but the
warez piece was the worst. How could you write
an article on software pirating without explaining
exactly how the warez scene works?
Separate groups specialize In "releasing'' games and
applications. People known as "couriers" spread the
files to FTP sites and BBSes* Releasers often have jobs
at software companies and can get ahold of new
titles early on.The names of the cracker, the releaser,
and the uploader are listed on every program. Some
people will do anything to get an early release and
will put out betas or incomplete programs.
Once the program is cracked and uploaded, the
courier groups do their thing. These groups are
assigned to specific BBSes and FTPs.The courier that
pumps out the most megs is allowed on more BBSes*
A good courier must move files everywhere - fast.
To do this, some couriers have two nodes or modems
uploading and downloading at the same time. Net
couriers deal with spreading megs on the Internet;
others spread warez through IRC A pirater in China
simply downloads a pirated version and copies it
onto some two-way CDs. It is easy. It also does not
take much skill to be a courier. All you need to know
is how to completely waste your life for the purpose
of fame and recognition.
"Lucky Luciano"
las Gatos, California
Credit Due
As a creative director in the kids' entertainment
business and a producer of online entertainment,
I am always excited to see more content devoted
to girls ("Girl Games," Wired 5.04, page 98), who have
been underserved tn the CD-ROM world. As the arti¬
cle mentioned, Chop Suey broke the mold.
However, I noticed a blooper in G. Beato's story.
Chop Suey was the collaborative work of two women:
Theresa Duncan and Monica Gesue. Not only did
Gesue conceive, illustrate, and art-direct the CD-ROM
project, some of the more memorable writing was
hers as well* Heck, Cortland, Ohio - where the story
Is set - is Gesue's hometown. In the spirit of profes¬
sionalism (and good manners), you should give
credit where credit is due,
David Vogler
davidv3249@aobcom
Digital Nations
Jon Katz's excellent "Birth of a Digital Nation" (Wired
5.04, page 49) was marred only by its ethnocentrlcity.
It is incumbent upon the digerati to be aware that the
online world is not American* The politics and morals
of the Net are being forged everywhere. In areas such
as export cryptography and censorship, US policy
designed to "regulate" cyberspace is already flounder¬
ing* Slowly and inexorably, control of such matters is
moving into the Digital Nation; a nation that is not
and will not be bounded by geographical borders.
Peter Miller
ocean@mpx*com*au
Let's Get Physical
Have the laws of physics changed recently? When
I was in high school, sound waves were carried by
□ 6
compressions and rarefactions of air ("Get Wireless/
Wired 5.04, page 142). Electromagnetic waves were
a completely different phenomenon, needing no
transmission medium whatsoever, Sounds and elec¬
tromagnetic signals were both described as waves,
because they each exhibited wavelike characteristics,
but they were very different things. Calling radio
waves and other electromagnetic waves "airwaves"
was just a metaphor,
Um, did this change? Your map of the electromag¬
netic spectrum seemed to include sound waves,
which is like including snail mall in a list of modems:
they're not the same thing.
Barrett Sundberg
actionBT@io.com
TKe Internet Revolution?
I read "The Internet Revolution" {Wired 5.04, page 122)
with growing dlsbelief.lt is a remarkable achievement
to write about a budding political revolution for 12
pages without actually discussing the politics of the
movement* David Bennahum mentions democracy a
few times and says something about antinatlonalism,
but by and large he gives a warm and fuzzy reading
about something not only unlikely but improbable.
By his own account, these people are apolitical and
their influence nil.
The Idea of the Web playing a role in a revolution
is exciting, but applying it to this particular situation
is far-fetched. I have received some of the emails from
Belgrade he refers to, but J could not help thinking
of the real, brutal massacre of hundreds of thousands
of people - on both sides, but mainly perpetrated by
the Serbs - and justified intellectually by the same
Serbian intellectuals and clergy who call themselves
"democrats/
I charge Bennahum with incredible naivety Igno¬
rance, and lack of journalistic curiosity for the truth.
It might have been an extremely titillating adoles¬
cent experience to be brushed by history, but both
ignoring political reality and trying to bend reality
to his partisan agenda is reprehensible.
Tamas Banovtch
manyooe@hotmaiLcom
Undo
■ Photo Finish: The negative/positive photographic
process was announced In 1839 ("The Future of
Photography/ Wired 5.03, page 90), the same year
the daguerreotype was Introduced. ■ Typos 'Rr Us:
Eric Michael Strauss's correct email address is eric
. Strauss Winter net mci.com (Rants & Raves, Wired 5.03,
page 44)*
Send your Rants & Raves to:
Email: rants@wired.com
Snail mail: Wired, PO Box 191826
San Francisco, C A 941 09-9866
WIRED JUNE \ 99 7
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Must-See PC TV
■ t was no mistake that the recent National Association of
I Broadcasters convention attracted a sizable contingent
from Silicon Valley and Redmond. As the biggest television
stations ready themselves to go digital in late 1998, many
could choose a video formal incompatible with computer
displays. So Bill Gates & Co. have stepped in to push their
digital TV concept to market first - all in a frantic effort to
win broadcasters oven
Subtlety has never been Chairman Bill's hallmark Micro¬
soft chose the eve of the convention to swallow up Internet
set-top box manufacturer WebTV for US$425 million. Then,
as if lhal weren't enough to get the attention of television
execs, Microsoft, Intel, and Compaq announced an enhanced
data-layering standard for PC-friendly digital TV. Add to this
IBM's announced digital broadcasting system, Logicast, and
you have ingredients for the best high tech race since VHS
faced off against Beta,
If aU goes as planned, the computer industry's version of
digital TV will go online by the third quarter of 1998. This
time, the superior technology may win. - Michael Grebb
r n
j
W U si D
In the latest rounds of the encryption battle royal, the
Clinton administration's key escrow proposals have
taken a beating - yet again*
In March, the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development released its "Guidelines for Crypto¬
graphy Policy," a document outlining principles that will
guide much of the industrial world. The OECD rejected
the US approach, choosing instead to leave key escrow
implementations to member nations*
Meanwhile, back at home, the Clinton
fOr Bill administration was caught flat-footed
circulating draft legislation that would
have the practical effect of compelling crypto users within
the US to participate in a government-dominated key
escrow scheme* A copy of the proposed law, euphemisti¬
cally called the Electronic Data Security Act of 1997, was
passed on to privacy advocates by sympathetic congres¬
sional staffers*
"The White House got caught with its pants down,"
says Jonah Seiger of the Center for Democracy and Tech¬
nology. "The administration wants the Net to be built to
its specifications, but that idea just isn't going to fly."
With opposition mounting, just a few more jabs could
put key escrow down for the count. - Todd Lappin
EH
WIRED JUNE 1997
Digital Face Lift
Using technology to artificially age an image - of a criminal a missing child, or an
actor - is nothing new. But Industrial Light & Magic faced a distinct challenge when
Veuve Clicquot, the great champagne house, made a related request. A woman of
the 19th century, Veuve founder Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin left behind only two
images, both portraits made while the grande dame was in her 70s. But the company
wanted a picture of Clicquot at 27, when her husband died and she took over,
transforming their champagne business. Susan Davis, manager of ILM's art depart¬
ment, told Veuve Clicquot, “If you want a scientific regression, we're not the ones.
But we can get you dose in a creative sense through research," So ILM found two
teenagers with facial features and ethnic backgrounds similar to the widow's and,
using Macs, morphed portions of 20 photos of one model and five of the other with
the original painting. The results can be seen at www.dicquotcomA - Chris Rubin
Elll Online Journalists Need Not Apply: Gut-wrenching public interest journalism, knee-scraping inves
tigative reporting, insightful editorials - these are the makings of a Pulitzer Prize. Oh, and did we men¬
tion that the distinguished works must be on paper? This year, two nominations were disqualified
because they failed to fulfill the prize's print requirement: Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace, a New York Times Net series on CD-ROM, and 'Our Town Charlotte," an online presentation
by the Sun Herald of Charlotte Harbor, Florida. The award's administrators are reevaluating the analog -only policy, but in the meantime, prize-eyed electronic reporters can only dream on.
=111 No Class: A study recently conducted by the Market Data Retrieval organi¬
zation concludes that classroom use of the Internet in grades 3 through 1 2
has not improved scholastic performance. The surveys were given to 6,000 ►
Low- Earth -of bit satellites
seem to be popping up
everywhere, Craig McCaw
and Bill Gates's joint ven¬
ture, Teledisc, recently
received FCC approval to
launch its digital commu¬
nications project by 2000,
and Motorola's Iridium has
announced that it will ramp
up its services to allow for
cellular-system roaming.
Why are LEO satellites sud¬
denly so hot? Equipped with
omnidirectional antennas,
these satellites will improve
everything wireless: fax, pag¬
ing, phone, and teleworking
services. Due to the greater
silicon densities achieved
over the last 20 years, capa¬
city has gone up, while price
has gone down, LEO satel¬
lites, orbiting a mere 500 to
1,000 miles above the earth,
use Jess power than their
older, bulkier counterparts
and boast no transmission
delays.
Lost track of who's launch¬
ing what, and when? See
below. - Julie Sullivan
Who
|| How many
||Launch date
Service date
What
Teledesk
840
2000
2002
Global broadband service including videoconferencing and
multimedia
Iridium
66
May 1997 April 1998
September 1998
Worldwide voice, data, fax service
Alcatel Alsthom
64
2001
2001
high-quality videoconferencing, teleworking, and entertainment
Globalstar
56 (48 operating;
8 spares)
August 1997
End of 1998
Voice, low-rate data exchange, some messaging, fax
Leo One
48
Pending
2000
Email, paging, messaging, fax
Orbcomm Global
1 36 (28 in orbit;
8 spares)
April 1995-March 1998
March 1998
Email, paging, messaging, fax
tco Global
12
September 1998
2000
Voice, data, internet communications
Odyssey
12
2000
2001
Mobile voice and data, phone service to remote regions
Or bi mage
3
Present to end of 1997
1997
Weather services, high-resolution digital photography
□ 2
WIRED JUNE 1997
IMAM 10 HN WESLEY If MON
Originally used by space-age
bachelors to illuminate their
pads, Lava Lite lamps have been
a perennial favorite of kitsch afi¬
cionados. But of the millions of
lights sold since 1963, six have
been assigned to a higher pur¬
pose - cryptography.
Silicon Graphics Inc. number
theorist Landon Curt Noll, along
with colleagues Robert Mende Jr.
and Sanjeev Sisodiya, is employ¬
ing the liquid-filled lamps to help
generate random numbers used
in cryptography.
Here's how the Lavarand sys¬
tem works; A digital camera snaps
a photo of six Lava Lites. A cryp¬
tographic hash formula is then
used to reduce the photo data
into a seed number. This seed is
plugged into a "Blum Blum Shuh"
pseudorandom algorithm and
presto! - out comes a crypto¬
graphically strong number. "It
sounds far out," Noli admits,
"but using Lava Lites to obtain
random numbers is based on
fundamental math and physics."
The scientists have applied for
a patent; in addition to using the
system at Silicon Graphics, the
trio hopes to license the tech¬
nology. "We have several inter¬
ested parties," Noll beams.
- Mark Frauenfelder
WIRED JUNE 1997
SI
,^ON EF
Canon
So advanced...it'$ simple
| |l \
K« n
HA\\m\.>\
Move over, GPS, British astronomer Peter
Buffett- Smith has invented a technology
that can pinpoint a digital cellular phone's loca¬
tion within a few hundred feet. The system, called
Cursor, tracks a handset by radio triangulation
- a method similar to the use of radio telescopes
to chart distant galaxies.
Using a ping-and-reply system, a transmitter
network relays the handset's location on the same
900-MHz phone frequencies. When the techno¬
logy becomes commercially available in 1998,
marketer Cambridge Positioning Systems envi¬
sions GPS-like uses such as regional mapping
and enhanced 91 1 tracking.
Privacy advocates have another take on it*
"This is likely to be used by law enforcement
to trace signals," says Marc Rotenberg, director
of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Under current law, telcos don't reveal call loca¬
tions. But the FBI is petitioning to change this.
"In the old days," notes Rotenberg, "the phone
didn't move." - David J. Wallace
► teache rs and I ibrarians - n o o n e a s ked the k i ds wha t they got
out of it. Ef anything, this argues for a change in the way we
teach our kids - starting with teachers and the definition of
"classroom performance." EDI Sign of the Times: America Online and its diskette packaging supplier are unhappy with each other. Apparently PTP Industries claims that AOL owes it
more than US$2 million, based on the 1 SO million irritating trial diskettes PTP claims to have distributed. AOL rebuts that PTP is overestimating the number of disks. Let’s see - a bit of
back-of-th e-envelope math should resolve this: About 20 percent of adult Americans - around 21 mtfTfcm - are now online. Another
1 7 million or so have computers but so far have resisted AOL's marketing come-cms. A little quick division yields only about four ►
aybe it's Just the Tinsel¬
town hangover brought
on by its 1 996 Oscar for techni¬
cal achievement, but IMAX has
gone Hollywood - big time. The
Toronto-based company, whose
large-screen, 3-D explorations
have long been staples of the
science-museum crowd, plans to
jack up its mass-market appeal
with more short fictional films
and a worldwide rollout of new
motion-simulator rides.
Last year, IMAX introduced
Wings of Courage, a 45-minute
3-D aviation adventure from
Sony Pictures Classics starring
Val Kilmer. Preliminary talks are
WIRED JUNE 1997
now under way to bring a Toy
Story- type film to multistory
screens, says IMAX chair Brad
Wechsler. And come December,
Vegas thrill seekers can board
Race for Atlantis for a digitally
animated chariot ride.
Over the next few years, IMAX
will add 45 new theaters to the
149 sites already spread across
the globe. The public can't seem
to eat it up fast enough. Some
65 million people saw IMAX
movies last year, quadrupling
the company's annual earnings
to US$15.4 million. For IMAX
shareholders, that's entertain¬
ment. - James Daly
□ 6
PHOTO ABOVE: DOMINIK GlGLER
OTD BlToW; PATRICIA E. If H W A L D £ ft IMA&i li A. N K
TIRED
Communist coups
Medellin cartel
Barbie Fashion Designer
Mac v. PC conversations
Agents
Electronics
Billboard liberation
SPF15
Java
Digital certificates
Erbium-doped silica fiber
Adbusters
Highlights
WIRED
Ponzi schemes
Russian aluminum mafia
Pretty Fighter X
NT v. Win 95 conversations
Negative agents
Skronk
Guerrilla gardening
5PF 50-plus
Cobol
Handshakes
Erbium-doped fluoride fiber
®™mark
MamaMedia
Austria Turns Off
Sometimes silence is the most effective
form of protest. The latest round of the
German government's
war against the Inter¬
net has crept across
national borders,
provoking an
unprecedented
response from
neighboring
ISPs: total
shutdown. The
two-hour strike this spring,
during which 98 percent of Austria
went dark, was set off by a national police
raid on a small Austrian ISP called VIP. The
cops, looking for child pornography, confis¬
cated ViP's computers - based on charges
filed in Munich against a ViP user. Nothing
was found.
This action is only the latest attempt
to impose German law on the global
internet. Even though Deutschland
knows it can't police the entire Net,
the country is banding
together with
sympathetic Euro-
W J Ml pean governments
w m ml to strong-arm users
r m ml into complying with
m ml Germany's laws. This has
m ml many ISPs living in fear.
But netizens are fight¬
ing back. Earlier this year,
German state prosecutors
trying to dose a Dutch ISP hosting a
militant left-wing magazine were forced
to back down in the face of an uproar
from the international Net community.
- Hah Kurtzru
► useless diskettes per com puter- (iterate American. Hmmmm. Cough it up, AOL. =111 Tokyo Online: The Japanese international teiecommuni
cations firm KDD reports that Internet traffic between the United States and Japan flows at more than twice the rate of voice traffic, and
half of voice traffic is not really voice at all, but fax. =111 1 V Spam Hater: The fistfight between spammers and bozo filters shows no signs
of easing, Steve Harris, creator of the Spam Hater freeware, has been proclaimed an "Internet folk hero" by Usenet denizens fed up with
unsolicited commercial email. Harris, a computer consultant based in the United Kingdom, made Spam Hater {www.compuIink.co.uk ►
Fresh from the late-night tele¬
vision circuit in Japan and a
European tour, The Tokyo Shock
Boys are hitting the Big Apple. At
the off- Broadway Minetta Lane
Theatre, the four kamikaze comics
drop fireworks down their pants,
spit milk from their eyes, and
swallow scorpions and cigarettes.
Geeks of global proportions, the
troupe sold out the Sydney Opera
House and a venue in London's
West End and even gave a com¬
mand performance for the queen
of Denmark,
Shock Boy Nambu performs one
trick audience members few will
try at home. Tethered to a chair
by his testicles, the showman tows
volunteers across the stage. Carol
Channing would be hard-pressed
to top that, - Ian Christe
WIRED JUNE 19 9 7
Battle Smarts
When is one US Marine bet¬
ter than three? When he
has an Apple Newton squirreled
away in liis foxhole. At least that's
what the military says it learned
last March when roughly one-
thiTd of the marines in a unit of
1,500 were sent into simulated
combat with a land-mobile radio
and a handheld computer.
Their opponents - a conven¬
tional force of 4,500 marines
armed with traditional radios -
found themselves dogged at every
turn by the tech-toting unit
“The idea was to marry tech¬
nologies with new organizational
strategies” says Commander Ron
Henderson, a US Navy officer who
participated in operation Hunter
Warrior. According to Henderson,
the wired warriors, whose leaders
had access to artificial-intelligence
strategy advice and virtual reality
helmets allowing them to track
them troops, “fought” well against
then- massed, heavily armed foes.
“Only one high tech outfit was
destroyed - virtually, of course ”
- Ashley Craddock
► /™flet-$ervices/$pam/) available to the public in November and recently released a new versloi
that identifies a spammer's upstream ISP. After Spam Hater digs up the perpetrator's and ISP's email addresses, the antispammer can send both parties messages such as "Your pun¬
ishment is to break up your modem with a hammer and eat it " This approach gets results: many ISPs have canceled spammer's accounts after being spammed themselves by Spam
Hater's replies, =11 1 HAL's First Words: At the University of Illinois's recent birthday bash for 2007; A Space Odyssey's HAL, guest of honor Arthur C Clarke (via cybercast from his home in
Sri Lanka) judged a contest to suggest what the world-famous computer's first words would be today. The winning entry: "Good evening, doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing
Windows 95 and all references to it from my hard drive." EHI
'j::- ;v*
- ' • i ■
inors can now enjoy squeaky-
clean computing, thanks to
ImageCeusor. Rilled as “antipor¬
nography software for Windows”
it stops smut cold on computers
running the Microsoft OS.
Unlike URL -based filtering soft¬
ware such as Net Nanny, Image-
Censor blocks dirty pictures from
he mg displayed, regardless of their
format or source - online, local
disk, or CD-ROM.
The product employs an image-
detecting algorithm developed by
scanning and color- testing thou¬
sands of nude photographs. “The
algorithm analyzes the color in
an image Lo determine its whole¬
someness * claims Philip Harris,
director of Microtrope, a developer
based in the United Kingdom. “We
then apply other filters to make it
more accurate.”
Asked whether a classic such as
Titian's Venus o f Urbina wrould be
blocked, Harris say that it probably
wouldn’t. As for other works of
art or science, iswe haven’t come
across any,” he says sheepishly.
- Michael Stutz
WIRED JUNE 199 7
□a
IMAGE BELOW: 5CALA/AFT RESOURCE. IMAGE ABOVE ORIGINAL PHOTO SUPERSTOCK, ILLUSTRATION MARC CONTRERAS
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HANDPICKED. MICROBREWED. FULLY CAFFEINATED.
Tejava tastes unlike any iced tea because it's microbrewed entirely from Java tea leaves-leaves handpicked on two
remote tea plantations on the island of Java. Only the top two leaves of each plant are picked, and only during
September and March-the optimum months. The result is an uncommonly pure, distinctively flavored premium Java Tea.
You can make
sacrifices
Introducing the Compaq Armada 7700, The high performance notebook that offers you the power
and functionality of an office desktop as far from your office as you need to be. Armada 7700
features include; up to 166 MHz Pentium1 processor with MMX™ technology, 12, T CTFT display,
©1997 Cnnipaij Cmnputfr CorporitiM). All rights mstwit. Coin(Uij registers*! U.S. Patent and Tradeinarl. Oflfue. Armada is a trademark of Compaq Computer (corporation. The Intel Inside Lego and Pentium are registered trademarks and
up to 2.1GB removable hard drive, up to 32 MB EDO RAM expandable to 144MB, integrated
,6K telephony modem upgradeable to 56K, integrated AC, and full desktop expansion.
ocate a Compaq Authorized Reseller, call 1-800-943-7656 or visit www.compaq.com. Has It Changed Your Life Yet?
lark of Intel Corporation.
©Imation 1997
about
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We're thinking what you're thinking: with your data, there's no such thing as safe enough.
At Imation, we understand. We're a new $2,2 bill bn world leader in information and imaging (NYSE symbol: IMN), and our business
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an added understanding of your needs that leads to great new ideas. Like LS-12G, the simple, easy new 120 MB diskette
technology that's compatible with standard diskettes. And our new DVD technology, which we support with full-service
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else. Which makes us a leader in more than technology We're also a leader in keeping your data safe. Call 1-888-466-3456 or see
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IMATION
Borne of 3M Innovation
T Telco
erronsm
If the Baby Bells get their way, you'll pay by the minute
and through the nose for the privilege of logging on.
But the Net has an unlikely defender: the FCC.
By Dedan McCullagh
d Young, Bell Atlantic’s chief lobbyist, is a
busy man - so busy, he says, that he can find time to
talk only between meetings in a Nynex boardroom in
Washington, DC. He waves expansively at the juice bar
and grins, “Take whatever you iike. It’s all paid for by
Nynex.” A moment later, Young denounces Internet
users for precisely the same attitude. “There’s no longer
a free Lunch,” he complains. “Internet welfare has to
stop It’s a catchy sound bite - honed through count¬
less repetitions over the last year - and Young has
spent a lot of time testing it out on Washington regu¬
lators. He says that fl at-rate Internet pricing is clog¬
ging phone lines, jamming telephone switches, and,
most important, costing his employer hundreds of
millions of dollars a year. Last summer, Bell Atlantic
teamed up with a few other Baby Bells to try to per¬
suade the Federal Communications Commission to
Declan McCullagh (decian@well.com) is Washington
correspondent for The Netly News (netlynews.com/).
levy minute-by-minute access charges on Internet
service providers - hefty fees that could double or
triple the average monthly bill. For the telcos, secur¬
ing permission to begin collecting access fees would
be like hitting the jackpot; a charge of merely 3 cents
a minute would bring in nearly US$6 billion in new
revenue each year.
But some important members of the high tech com¬
munity worry that it could also trigger the death of
the Net. Three-cents-a-minute access fees would boost
a service provider’s costs by more than $100 a month
for each subscriber who logs on for two hours a day.
In an era when $19.95-per-:month flat-rate pricing
reigns supreme, the thought of shelling out per-minute
access charges to local phone companies has the online
industry scared shitless. CompuServe, for example,
estimates that its phone costs would zoom from $56
million to $367 million. The online and high tech
industries have counterattacked, arguing that while
more than 18 million Americans creep through cyber¬
space using modems that sip bandwidth through
twisted-pair straws, the telcos want more money yet
refuse to improve service by bringing high-speed data
connections to the local loop. ►
WIRED JUNE 1997
THE NETIZEN
The stage has been set for a showdown between a
telephone industry regulated since its birth and a new
economy that has prospered with surprisingly little
government interference. The tug-of-war pits but¬
toned-down monopolies against a rough-and-tumble
collection of Silicon Valley bigwigs. Faced with poten¬
tial disaster, the high tech coalition has had no choice
but to learn the art of war as it is waged within the
confines of the FCC’s arcane rulemaking process.
This strange form of bureaucratized combat - which
operates under the guise of public policy - has plenty
of precedents in the annals of American capitalism.
But in this particular fight, an unusual third set of
combatants has been dragged into
the struggle: grassroots Internet
users. Speaking with a mixture
of awe and bewilderment, FCC
attorney James Casserly says,
“In the past, we’ve never seen
anything like this ”
In the showdown over
access charges, the
high tech community
has been forced to
learn the art of war as
it is waged within the
confines of the FCC's
rulemaking process.
A case of congestion
It’s not that the telcos1 anxieties
are entirely unfounded: real prob¬
lems loom on the horizon. Amer¬
ica’s local-loop architecture - in
which modems use analog phone
lines for digital communications
- is vulnerable to network con¬
gestion, and flat- rate pricing for
phone and Internet service seems destined to exacer¬
bate the problem. This is largely because telephone
networks are designed around the assumption that
roughly one in every7 eight subscribers will try to use
the phone simultaneously - which, in turn, means
that if just 12 percent of an area’s customers are online
at once, nobody else can nse the phone. In other words,
America’s telecommunications infrastructure, was
designed to facilitate occasional analog calls, not con¬
tinuous digital connections. The telcos are standing at
a crossroads, stuck with a network that was designed
for voice traffic but that now groans under the weight
of data calls. The Baby Bells understand this, and they
say they want to go digital. Which raises the questions:
How will they do it, when will they do it, and, more
important, who will pay?
Both sides agree that the solution lies in new tech¬
nology. Currently, most phone calls travel along an
analog phone hue to a digital switch that connects to
an analog outgoing line. Find a way to bypass the
analog connections with end-to-end digital networks,
and the congestion problem disappears. Here’s why:
To transmit data, analog circuit-switched networks
require a continuous open channel, which must be
maintained even when it’s not in use. But a digital
packet-switched network, such as the Internet, breaks
the data into small chunks that are sent as needed
asynchronously and reassembled by the receiver.
Right now, the telcos have no financial incentive to
promote speedier, more efficient technologies - and
when they’ve tried, they've blown it through a combi¬
nation of high prices and notoriously bad customer
service and support. Take ISDN, a digital technology
that has been ready-to-arrive for 25 years but never
quite did. “The problem isn’t technology,” according
to James Love, an economist at the Ralph Nader-spon¬
sored Consumer Project on Technology. “It’s monopoly
pricing by the telcos”
There are even better technical solutions than ISDN,
such as xDSL, about which the telcos appear ambiva¬
lent at best. They shouldn’t be. The xDSL family of
digital-subscriber-line technologies could provide a
way out of the regulatory staredown between the tel¬
cos and the Net, supercharging ordinary copper wires
to carry data at Ethernet speeds without clogging the
voice network.
Studying the studies
For now, however, both sides are pumping most of
their energy into spinning the argument. Last June
and July, Bell Atlantic, U S West, PacBell, and Nynex
launched the opening salvo in the access-fee battle
by passing along a few studies to the FCC. The Bell
Atlantic report noted that Net surfers use their phone
lines to make longer calls, with an average length of
18 minutes, compared with 5 minutes for a typical
voice call Meanwhile, Bell Atlantic said it spends $75
to service and maintain each local loop that runs into
an ISP line - lines that generate revenues of only $17
per month. That piddling 17 bucks, the telcos claim,
barely covers the cost of keeping a dial tone humming,
and isn’t nearly enough to pay for the expensive
upgrades needed to handle circuit-gobbling Internet
providers. If more money isn’t spent to upgrade the
network, the scaremongers warn, traffic jams caused
by gluttonous Internauts could become a public men¬
ace. The report concluded that “service interruptions
of even a temporary length could affect public safety'
services such as 911 service, with unthinkable conse¬
quences.” The telcos’ solution: the FCC must let them
levy per- mi note access charges to raise the hundreds
of mil lions of dollars a year needed to keep the phone
system from crashing.
To battle the phone companies’ analytical onslaught,
Intel, Compaq, IBM, America Online, CompuServe,
and a handful of trade associations formed the Inter¬
net Access Coalition in the autumn of 1996 to craft a
counterstudy to rebut the telcos’ claims. Delivered to
the FCC in January 1997, the coalition report, titled
“The Effect of Internet Use on the Nation’s Telephone
Network,” blasted telco assumptions and pointed out
their hypocrisy: the Baby Bells whine that flat-rate ►
ILLUSTRATION BY SCOTT MBNCHIN
WIRED JUNE 199?
THE NET1ZEN
Internet services are congesting phone lines even as
many of them are peddling flat-rate Internet access
themselves. Some have actually given it away - in
California, PacBell offered five months of free Internet
service and waived installation charges for customers
who ordered a second phone line. How can a cash-
strapped phone company afford this? Since many
homes are already wired For two lines, second-line
service has become a source of easy profits for the
telcos. In 1995, for example, second lines generated six
times the revenues the Baby Bells now say they need to
upgrade their networks.
The coalition's debunking was thorough. Even if
data calls average 20 minutes - so
what? One such call eats up fewer
phone company resources than 20
individual one-minute voice calls.
Moreover, the much-publicized
“clogged network” numbers came
from areas with exceptionally
heavy modem use - regions that
are hardly representative of the
network as a whole. In other
words, the telcos gave the FCC
anecdotal, worst-case estimates
of network-congestion difficulties
and presented them as common¬
place, or perhaps even dangerous.
The phone companies reacted
to the 1AG study by retreating
from their initial position. No longer will you hear
their lobbyists talk of 3-cents-a- minute access sur¬
charges; since early this year the fallback stance has
been to seek some charge - any charge! - as long as
it's collected through a metered pricing scheme. “It
doesn't have to be a large charge ” Bell Atlantic's Ed
Young now says. “It can be something of the magni¬
tude of a penny a minute, or even less. But it has to
be something ”
The friendly FCC?
The Baby Bells might have assumed they had allies
in the four FCC commissioners. The agency's history
is replete with precedents in which decisions have
shielded venerable industries from competition by
upstarts. The commission delayed the introduction of
FM radio to protect AM stations. It stalled cable tele¬
vision to benefit broadcasters. No wonder, then, that
many Internet users took for granted that it would
happily sacrifice the Net to spare the telcos.
But, surprisingly, the FCC has often gone out of its
way to protect the Net from telco onslaughts. A 1980
directive dubbed “Computer IF said the commission
would regulate only “basic” telephone services, not
providers of “enhanced services.” That marked the
Net's first reprieve, as the “enhanced service provider”
category includes everything from voicemail services
to alarm-monitoring firms to Internet providers.
In 1984 Ma Bell splintered, and the FCC decided
to tack an “access charge” of roughly 5 cents a minute
onto every long distance call to compensate local phone
companies for completing the local-loop connection.
The Net's second reprieve came when commission¬
ers ruled that enhanced service providers wouldn't
be obliged to pay similar access charges because of
the “severe rate impacts” that would result.
Finally, in 1987, the telcos trotted out many of the
hardship claims they still use today, saying that voice
users were subsidizing the clunky online services of
the time, and demanding that the FCC impose per-
minute access charges on them. The nascent high tech
community responded to the affront quickly. Irate
BBS sysops buried the agency in faxes (a novelty at the
time), while firms such as IBM, Digital, and Compu¬
Serve persuaded a few members of Congress to inter¬
vene. In the end, the commissioners ruled for the
Net and against the telcos, saying that it was inappro¬
priate to assess per-minute charges on the fledgling
online industry.
That ruling, which immunized ISPs and online ser¬
vices against access charges, is what the telcos now
call obsolete. Access charges, paid mostly by long dis¬
tance companies, added up to more than $23 billion
in 1996. These days, however, long distance compa¬
nies like MCI and AT&T are cajoling the commission
to reduce access charges, and the FCC seems sympa¬
thetic to the idea. This means long distance rates may
soon be dropping. But it also means the Baby Bells
will pull in less cash from long distance carriers -
a potential shortfall that perhaps explains why they
are now so hungry to levy access charges on Internet
providers.
All this wonk warfare might have gone largely
unnoticed on Main Street USA, were it not for an
FCC Web page that solicited public input on the
access-charge issue. Only a few comments trickled
in during the first few weeks after the page was put
up in December 1996. But as the spring comment
deadline grew near, the word got oul: the FCC was
poised to screw the Net. Between February 1 and Feb¬
ruary 14, hundreds of thousands of irate emails flooded
isp@fcc.gov , In message after message, Internet users
pleaded, argued, and reasoned with the agency not
to levy access charges. One message labeled the telcos'
demands “just another scamsothe greedy phone
companies can separate even more money from con¬
sumers ”
This tidal wave of digital bile did not escape the
attention of Reed Hundt, chair of the FCC. “Imposing
today's interstate access charges on Internet users is
the information-highway equivalent of reacting to pot¬
holes by making drivers pay for a new toll road ” isi*
All this wonk warfare
might have gone
largely unnoticed on
Main Street USA, were
it not for an FCC Web
page that solicited
public input on the
access-charge issue.
WIRED JUNE 1997
Introducing the MessagePad 2000,
the only handheld computer you can actually use.
There's fast Ami then there's fast
The MessagePad 2000 comes
with a screaming 160 MHz RISC
processor which offers uplofhv
Of all the handheld computers, only the MessagePad
2000 offers sharp, crip backlighting and a f&lmf
high-resolution gray-scale screen that rotates on com¬
mand. Winch means you can atewys see your work
in the best orientation —bowmlai or vertical even
upside down. And in the best light. Bright Or dim
BuiU-m software lets you conned
dimity to a variety of serial. IrDA
and IncalTalk' printers - unlike most
Windows' CE devices, which hate to be
ho oked up to a PC in order to print
The .MessagePad 2000 gfresyou metre flexibility,
thanks to its two PC slots (other handhelds bam
only me slat). Sojor example, you can dedicate
me to a aired or wireless modem ami use the
other for additional memory.
The usable arm of the MessagePad 2000 screen is up to 56 %
20- 40 MHz processors you get
with other handheld devices
you can read the entire
How much con you do in three to
six weeks? That's bon* long a set of AA
batteries lasts under nomat usage,
Note: normal usage here means a lot.
Lite bavittg backlighting on, using the
modem, crunching members, writing
e-mail, dnmmg, doodling whatever.
A built-in microphone and speaker letyou
record and play1 hack voice dictation. And the
MessagePad 2000 tr the only handheld com¬
puter that ktsyou record and tote notes
simultaneously.
with desktop computers. Soym cun
2000, then transfer them to ami
from Microsoft' Excel or Word on any
Windows or Mad OS-based system.
Or you cm keep your calendar and
address book current byjyncbrorm-
ii i; i T3i in is i mi m ivn i v i r- 1 i-
f- 1 in in in in v i hvit ihi-i h i ii i t. i
l'-«inin>iinin>iinviim: it iv-
I- im in i*i in in vi in in in v i in i-
hiMV IT HHV1V
like Micrmjt Schedule + 70 or Claris
Organizer" 2.0. And it s easy: with
Auto Dock , the MessagePad 2000
Unlike Windows CE-based devices, MessagePad
2000 is the only handheld computer that lets
you exchange data with both Windcnes and
Mac OS-based computers.
real detachable keyboard (not a fry, Jtn$r-crampmg
version), So you can quickly and easily type e-mail t
business tetters, project reports. Only. your superb
writing style - not your aching fingers- uill deter¬
mine the length of your doamtents.
Of all the handheld computers out there, only one makes it truly easy to be productive on the road. Introducing die MessagePad* 2000.
Rather than just letting you view data, the MessagePad 2000 lets you carry out sophisticated tasks with the greatest of ease. For example:
you can now write a full-length proposal, insert information downloaded from the Web — even include pricing from your company’s
Intranet— and then fax or e-mail it to a client. Try' that with an ordinary handheld computer. The MessagePad 2000 has more power,
more storage, more flexibility. All contained within the most innovative design, optimized for usefulness. Of course, /
there’s only one real way to understand how incredible the new MessagePad 2000 is: try it yourself. For the name
of a dealer near you , or to get more information, call 800-909-0260. Or visit us at www.newton. apple.com/useit. Nwtor
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Discobot
Ifyo 0 hanker to do
karaoke right , you might
want to employ a little
Japanese mechanical
wizardry . With a 3, 000-
song repertoire and o
data line for digital up¬
dates, the Party DAM is
your personal sing-atong
robot * It employs the
MIDI musk standard and
has more than 500 instru¬
ment sounds , letting you
rearrange the tunes with
techno or Jamaican fla¬
vors. It even does games
like bingo * Party DAM:
¥1,400,000 (US$11,415}*
Daitchikosho Co. Ltd.;
+81 (3) 3280 2165 ,
on the Web at www
.dkkaraoke.co.jp/.
" The world's fastest
notebook/' scream ads
for Apple's new Power-
Book 3400c . And with a
240-MHz 603e PowerPC
processor, maybe it's
time to believe the hype «
Throw in built-in Ether¬
net and modem capa¬
bilities, hot-swappable
expansion-bay modules,
four-speaker sound
system, and a 12.1-inch
active-matrix SVGA dis¬
play, and this clicking
computer might be the
lost lottery ticket the
company has been
searching for - until, of
course, Apple releases
the lighter model that's
rumored to fit in an IBM-
made 4-pound ThinkPad
shell. PowerBook 3400a
US$6,500. Apple: +1
(408} 996 1010, on the
Web at www.apple.com/*
Warning
Notebook jackers
beware. Defcon 1,
a battery -pow¬
ered an tit he ft
alarm system, senses
the prying hands of digi¬
tal -age rustlers and
responds with a blaring
110-decibel alarm. Most
locks loop through a slot
an the notebook and are
secured to some immov¬
able object, but they're
useless when your com¬
puter is left out in open
spaces. Defcon 1 , on the
other hand, attaches to
your carrying case and
howls like a coyote when
someone trips its motion
detector. DefCon 1:
US$49.95. Port ; (800}
242 3133, on the Web
at www.portinctcofn/.
i
s;
If a disaster strikes and
no one's there to report
it, does it make a sound?
With the GPS Reporter,
you'll have an answer.
Built for the Japanese
market by Toshiba and
designed for use In the
field, the Reporter
consists of a
digital still cam¬
era with a micro¬
phone and monitor^
a GPS receiver, a com¬
puter for storing posi¬
tion data, and a cellular
phone . The Reporter, in
other words, lets you let
the world know what's
going on. And if It hap¬
pens you end up needing
some assistance your¬
self, f/iar GPS data will
have the rescue party
looking in the right
place * GPS Reporter;
¥1,500,000 (US$1 2,230}.
Toshiba Carp.; +81 (3)
3457 4451.
It helped to
control free
Who better to design
, and engineer a
great handling
sedan than
people who are
obsessed with
power and control?
It was just such people who
insisted Dodge Stratus ES
have standard ^
anti-lock brakes as
well as a fully
independent,
modified
double-wishbone
suspension like you 'd
find in race cars ;
They lobbied for an available
speed-sensitive, variable-assist,
rack-and-pinion steering system
that allows for easy maneuvering
in parking situations, yet provides
plenty of road input at speed. They
wanted the option of an AutoStidf*
transmission that gives you the
responsiveness of a manual And in
their ultimate power play, they saw
to it that Stratus ES has
an available 24-valve ;
single overhead
cam V-6.
But by meeting
their demands, it
seems we met yours,
too , Because in J.D, Power
and Associates latest A PEAL
Study™, Stratus tied as the "Most
Appealing Entry Mid-Size Car:’*
For still more information, call
I -800-4- A -DODGE or
visit our Web site at
http://www. 4adodge. com
*1996 Automotive Performance* Execution, and Layout Study, based on 75A92 consumer responses. Always wear your sent belt.
Chalk
The Triumph T595 Day¬
tona may look like a
flying banana, but you
won't be sUp-slidin'
along while riding this
high-powered bad boy .
Packing a 955- cc engine
that harnesses 125
horses of pure riding
excitement, this three-
cylinder motorcycle
flat-out hauls . Backed
by Triumph's impressive
technology and incorpo¬
rating its classic design,
the T595 comes in stron¬
tium yellow and jet black .
More important, it actu¬
ally looks like a bat out
of helL Who would have
guessed? Triumph T595 :
US$10,695. Triumph
Motorcycles Limited:
+ 1 (77 0} 621 9500,
on the Web at www
.triumph.co.uk/.
One thing technology
has dispensed with is
the need for larger -
than-life stereos and
monster-truck-sized
speakers . JBL's ESC 550
satisfies your home the¬
ater needs simply and
elegantly • Five satellite
speakers and a 250-watt
subwoofer swath the
room in audio as you sit
back, issuing commands
to The Source, rite 550's
command center . Under¬
neath its steek facade lie
a CD player, an AM/FM
tuner, and a Dolby Pro
Logic surround sound
processor , Worried about
your decor I It comes in
black or white . ESC 550 :
1/551,699*95. JBL: (800)
226 4525, on the Web at
www.Jbl.com/.
a i
Whiteboards are great,
except what do you do
with ail those great dia¬
grams and nates once
you're finished brain *
storming I Now you can
have your whiteboard
and ear if too . Ibid is
a simple whiteboard
system that connects to
your PC With it, you can
do all the wild-and-
crazy, out-of-the-box
thinking you want , and
then take your notes
and print, email, or
export them (as image
files } into other pro¬
grams . ' Course , for it to
do any good, you've got
to think of something
really worthwhile to
scribble* ibid: US$499 ,
MicroTouch: {800} 642
7686, on the Web at
www.mkrotouch.com/.
A common joke making
the rounds calls the
mailing list push media's
kitler app: No hassles .
tow bandwidth . Now
Minolta is doing for
audio what the mailing
list does for text . The
PCFM Receiver plugs
into your Wintel PC's
25-pin serial port and
delivers broadcast-qual¬
ity radio direct to your
sound card . While the
rest of the world strug¬
gles to glimpse postage-
stamp-sized QuickTime
movies, you'll be enjoy¬
ing Fresh Air with Terry
Gross and drinking your
morning coffee. PCFM
Receiver: US$59.95 .
Minolta: + f {201} 825
4000, on the Web at
www.miiiolt3usa.com/.
WIRED JUNE 1997
Sfel Automatic Chronograph
Bash
Keith Moan might turn
in his grave, but when it
tames to digital rhythms ,
the Yamaha DTX elec¬
tronic percussion system
wlii take same beating*
The updated module can
synthesize 880 drum
sounds , and the onboard
five -track sequencer wilt
record MIDI data and
let you layer five notes
on one drum . And while
the DTX will definitely
loosen up your drum¬
ming style , playing it
in the swimming poof ►
is not recommended .
OK, Keith? Nine-piece
DTX Electronic Percus¬
sion System: US$2,335.
Yamaha Corporation of
America: + 7 (676) 940
4900 , on the Web at
www.yamaha.com/.
Stun
The Star Trek Phaser
Remote turns couch-
potato time into space
exploration . Eager for
a little telematic justice?
When the cantankerous
McCoy starts messing
with that pointy-eared
cutse called Spock, just
zap the ornery sa w-
bones with the mute .
Press a button and out
shoot surprising phaser
sounds , zapping Oprah
where it hurts . And
adding to your pleasure
as you key in commands,
the universal remote
emits a deep, satisfying
ruby glow . Kirk never
had it so good * Star
Trek Phaser Remote ; ►
US$39,95, The Edge
Company: (BOO) 732
9976, on the Web at
www.edgeco.com/.
WIRED JUNE 1997
04
Print
Digital cameras are
great, twt how do you
get the pictures out of
your PC and into your
scrapbook I TruPhoto is
the final step in elimi¬
nating the Fotomat from
your life forever. The
printer's heat and ultra-
viol et- 1 ig h t-s ens iti ve
Thermo-Autochrome
paper produces 744 pix¬
els per inch , delivering
3.5-by-5-inch images
that are near photo¬
graphic quality . The
manual stinks, but with
some practice you'll get
results you'll be proud
of* TruPhoto: US$449 .
Panasonic Interactive
Media: + T (408) 653
7 888f on the Web at
www.truphoto.com/.
Mode
Surfer Pro is the new
depeche mode. In the
form of a tiny surfboard,
this stylish modem sup¬
ports data speeds up
to 33*6 Kbps and fax
speeds to 74.4. Sporting
a brightly colored "surf-
suit," it comes armed
with software applica¬
tions to send and receive
data and faxes and store
voice messages. Once
you get over the corny
sur f analogy, you'll be
pleased to learn the Pro
corner equipped with
browser software. Surfer
Pro; £149 (US$238)*
Psion Dacom PLC: +44
(1908) 261686, email
dacom@psion.com.
Thanks to Jesse Freund,
Anne Speedie, Megumi
Ikeda, Tadashi ibi. Wired
Japan, and Wired UK.
Best Consumer Digital Camera
(Macllser EddyAwards,Jan.’97)
Product of the Year
(InfoWorld, Jan.’97)
Stellar
(Windows Sources, Jan. ’97)
★★★★
(ComputerLife, Feb. '97)
Any questions?
Plenty. Haw many pictures does the
D-200L take?
Up to 80.
You’re not sure?
You can shoot in both high-resolution or
standard formats. And switch back and
forth whenever you want. Even delete
the shots you don’t want at any time.
picture quality is where the D-200L
really outperforms the competition.
Who says?
InfoWorld , for one: ‘The image quality
far surpassed any of the other digital
cameras.” And Windows Sources: “It
delivers the best images we’ve seen
from a consumer-level camera.”
How do I know which ones to delete
or keep?
You can instantly
view the images
you just captured.
What about the lens?
It’s a razor sharp, wide angle, macro,
Olympus glass lens.
Flash?
With red-eye reduction, fill flash and
auto mode.
Where?
On the color LCD screen. One at a
time or nine at a time.
What’s the resolution?
640 x 480, But you’re not buying a pixel
taker. It’s pictures you’re after. And
But does it feel like a camera?
With an optical viewfinder and Olympus
design, it follows in the footsteps of
the Stylus series, the most successful
line of 35mm cameras in the world
Okay. I take a color shot.
Now what?
Download the image into a computer,
either Windows™ PC or a Mac? Then
go to town.
Talk to me.
Create multiple images from one
image. Or combine several. Add and
subtract color. Retouch, Crop.
Go on.
E-mail it across the Internet. Put it on a
Web page. Store it on disk.
Suppose I want to be creative?
With the included Adobe PhotoDeluxe^
software you can make greeting cards
and real estate listings, design layouts,
put together mail-order catalogs and
newsletters. All in full living color.
Hold it! How much is all of this
going to cost me?
$599.
That’s it?
That’s it.
There must be a science to all this.
And an art.
To learn more about the D-20GL and how it
completes the ideal home or office imaging
system, contact your Olympus Marketing
Representative at 1-800-622-6372. They Ml also
tell you all about the new Olympus personal
storage system and CD writer.
OLYMPUS*
THE ART & SCIENCE OF IMAGING”
Visit us at http://ww w.olympus .tom /digital
f&arKl™ Alt trademarks and registered trademarks mentioned herein
are ihe property of the respective holders.
The Ait arid Science of Imaging is a tradema/k of Olympus America Inc.
tniaWorid & MscUse* awards received 1/97. SSI 997 Olympus America fnc-
KENSINGTON
Orbit
Orbit.
It’s a trip.
Tired of that same old mouse? Want to go where no
one has ever gone before?
Buckle your seatbelts and get ready for Orbit,
Orbit is a new kind of trackball that combines the
comfort of a mouse with the precision of a trackball
And Orbit is designed to feel like an extension of
your own hand. The result is out-of-this- world
comfort and total fingertip control of your cursor.
Orbit comes with our award-winning Mouse Works
software, a 5-year warranty, toll-free technical
support, and a no-risk 90-day trial.
Don't settle for the ordinary. Get into Orbit.
KENSINGTON
www.kensington.com
micro CEnun SEARS
Ortiii and Mouse Works are trademarks and Kensington is « registered trademark of Kensington Micmware Limited. AH otfier trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © 19V7 Kensington Mienowanc Limited. 3/97
PHOTO ABOVE: DARRELL EAGEH
Common Sense
, hen Thomas Paine published
' w Common Sense in 1776 - argu¬
ing that the American cause was
not merely a revolt against unfair
taxation, but a demand for indepen¬
dence - he had no idea that more
than 200 years later, the struggle for
freedom would be waged between
privacy advocates and the national-
security establishment.This time,
the dispute is over not taxation
without representation, but com¬
munication without government
intervention.
One of today's crypto revolution¬
aries is Bruce Schneier, the neatly
dressed, ponytailed author of Applied
Cryptography . Schneier also recently
helped identify a key flaw in the
encryption scheme the US digital
cellular industry had adopted for use
in cell phones. Although Schneier
is well known in the cryptography
community, few realize he also devel¬
oped the Bfowfish encryption algo-
- 'H V
- . t v.
k mn
Ww
Bruce Schneier aboveboard in the underground.
both unbroken and unpatented
- a feat that has earned it a place
in dozens of commercial products,
including Symantec's Norton Your
Eyes Only and McAfee's PCCrypto.
Blowfish is a free encryption algorithm
that remains unbroken and unpatented.
rithm - a symmetric block cipher
with a key length that varies from
32 to 448 bits.
Schneier designed Blowfish in
1993 to satisfy the need for an
effective and free encryption algo¬
rithm to replace the aging DES
standard After almost four years
of public testing, Blowfish remains
While Schneier hasn't made any
money from the widespread adop¬
tion of his algorithm, he's satisfied
that Blowfish has earned its users'
trust,
Schneier's Web site belies the pop¬
ular image of privacy advocates as
rogue cypherpunks and disgruntled
militia types with something to hide.
As president of Counterpane Systems,
a consulting firm
specializing in
cryptography and
computer security,
Schneier is too
enmeshed in the
high tech industry
to qualify as a true
subversive. Consis¬
tent with his above¬
board persona, the
Blowfish source
code is conspicu¬
ously absent from
wwwxounterpane
.com/- a fact that
Schneier ruefully
attributes to'Jthe
administration and
its export laws."
Instead, he simply provides links
to sites beyond the reach of the
US government, where others have
made his code available for public
scrutiny.
Although several crypto liberaliza-
tion bills were introduced in the US
Senate last spring, Schneier remains
wary of government-backed encryp¬
tion proposals, Were he more fearful
of prosecution, he might never have
released Blowfish into the wilds of
cyberspace. But as he sees it, "It's
always better to seek forgiveness
than to ask for permission/'
- Tom Clabum
Shake, Wobfote. and Rod
I
f you want your printing job done perfectly,
don't bother calling John Upchurch and Matt
MoClintock.The two art school grads own and
operate Fireproof Press, a letterpress and graph¬
ics company that specializes in small print runs,
hand-set type, and customized packaging that
recalls an earlier era.
In their third-floor shop in Chicago, Upchurch
and McClintock maintain five electric and treadle-
driven presses - cast-iron monsters whose blue¬
prints reflect late-19th-century designs. The bulk
of Fireproof's business comes
from independent record labels
looking for a distinctive CD or
UP jacket. More than 40 artists -
including Steve Albini, Rachel's,
Tortoise, and Stereolab - have _
contracted Fireproof to crank out their covers.
"Each piece is its own thing, rather than some
reproduction of an ideal on a computer," Upchurch
says." We're not reproducing things, we're producing
them/' - Colin Berry
Perfect imperfection.
07
WIRED JUNE 1997
www.southpea
CHANGE
THE WAY YOU
GAME
Ever tried to stay awake through those games that promise “complete immersion"? You know,
the ones that make you sit passively through a bunch of predefined video streams - or worse
yet - subject you to cheaply rendered environments?
Introducing SouthPeak Interactive’s Video Reality.™
It isn’t a game. It’s the driving force behind a new
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vfy,- .
NEVER AGAIN
Antiquarian Book Hack
As the battle for online book sales gathers momentum, Berkeley, California,
bibliophile Jay Miller is settling into his market niche like dust on a book
jacket. Miller, 26, has tapped into a network of dealers, collectors, and lib¬
raries to create an online search service for rare and used volumes at www
. eas tbaybo ofcs. com A
Miller's East Bay Book Company has all the charming chaos of a second¬
hand bookstore. But in lieu of crusty professorial types browsing the stacks,
twentysomething crunchies stare at computer screens, processing up to
400 requests a day from all over the world. "People drive themselves nuts
searching for old books," Miller says, "but I can locate a first-edition copy
of Finnegans Wake within minutes." Meanwhile, he's laughing all the way
to the bank. "I started with US$690 and a 486 PC," he says. "Within a year,
I grossed $375,000."- Rachel Lehmann-Haupt
Squish That Turret
In T995, Anthony Stonefield
was a 32-year-old indepen¬
dent music producer when
he read about a new music-
Now Stonefield has formed
his own company. Global Music
Outlet, with the first and only
license to use AT&T's com pres-
■
m
T H\V 'SX
mm
mi
1
Anthony Stonefield will expose you to something different
compression technology that
had recently been developed
at Bell tabs. Stonefield reached
out to touch AT&T - and told
the company to do things his
way. "I said that if they built in
copyright protection, this would
be the ultimate solution to music
distribution over the Met. Luckily,
someone listened. AT&T formed
a business division to support
the product, and they hired me
as their consultant."
sion scheme for commercial
music distribution.The system
is three times as efficient as
sound samples, you can open
an account with a credit card,
and if you hear a song you like,
you pay just 99 cents to down¬
load it for keeps. Using Electric
Record Player freeware, you can
replay the song from your PC
whenever you wish. Other Web
sites offer music that you can
call your own, but most charge
artists to participate, then give
the music away. Under Stone-
field's scheme, artists receive
royalties for their work.
Born in South Africa, Stone-
field's tastes are eclectic, so
Global Music features African
artists such as Johnny Clegg
of Juluka in addition to main¬
stream acts such as Foreigner
and Christopher Cross. Stone-
fieid expects to have 1 0,000
songs online by year's end.
Making money is an obvious
priority, but Stonefield also hopes
Global Music will enable artists
with a different sound to more
Global Music's compression scheme cuts
sound files to 4.5 percent of normal size.
MPEG-2, squishing sound files to
4.5 percent of their normal size
with no perceptible loss in qual¬
ity, so that a 4-mlnute song fits
into 2 megs of disk space.
After browsing Global Music's
Web site for free, 20-second
easily find an audience. But can
Global Music really connect users
with vital new talent? Drop your
needle on www.globalmusic
.com/, and listen for yourself.
- Charles Platt
Jargon Watch
A feature added to
a product solely to meet a requirement
on a spec sheet, regardless of the fea¬
ture's utility to the user.
Telecom¬
muters who cross borders to compete
for jobs in more affluent countries.
The latest scheme in
Web advertising these ads pop up as
the reader moves from one page to
another. Advertisers love interstitials
because they can be sure that the
user will notice their ads.
A We b site t ha t w ra ps its
own identifying frame around other
sites that are linked from it. Para-sites
often create confusion as to who Is
responsible for a page's content.
Indiscriminate, spamlike appli¬
cations of push -media technology.
Tip o' the straw hat to Andrew Anker,
Donna Hoffman , and Kevin 5. Liske.
- Gareth Branwyn (jargon^wired.com)
WIRED JUNE 1997
BO
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digital delivery network
Dream Weaver
hat does it mean when
you go downstairs in the
morning to find Bill Gates serv¬
ing you coffee while Claudia
Schiffer carries in a plate of flap-
jacks? Wake up, pal! It means
you're dreaming.
But according to Jeremy
Taylor, America Online's dream
expert/'there is no such thing
as a dream with only one mean¬
ing. All dreams have multiple
layers of significance." Taylor
believes that only a dreamer
can genuinely know what mean¬
ing his or her dream may have
- an understanding that usually
other people's dreams for more
than 25 years. In late 1969,
he was inspired by a commu¬
nity effort to fight racism. After
struggling with ineffective
methods, Taylor began asking
people to share their dreams
about racism based on his
belief that doing so brings
relief to people afflicted by
repressed racial hostility*
When America Online asked
Taylor to practice his dream-
analysis techniques in cyber¬
space, he wasn't sure that the
Internet is a personal enough
medium for such intensely
emotional work. But after
he relented to the provider's
pleas, Taylor was pleasantly
surprised by the results.Taylor
On AOL's Dream Show, dream-analysis
techniques have come to cyberspace
arrives as a wordless "aha!" of
self-realization.
Taylor, an ordained Unitar¬
ian Universalist minister and
an instructor at several San
Francisco Bay area colleges,
has been combing through
says that despite the absence
of facial expressions and body
language online, you can still
conduct high-quality dream
work on the Web. "I miss the
visual clues, but there are also
clues in language and keyboard
slips that are also quite reveal¬
ing! A compensation process
comes into play when the inter¬
locutors are invisible to one
another"
On AOL's Dream Show, a per¬
son named Kairosmg describes
the late-night wanderings of
his subconscious/What does
it mean when I dream about
a girl i work with who has a
baby, and I move my whole
family into her house?"This
cyber dreamer adds that the
woman's neighbors are gang¬
sters and that he witnesses a
shootout in the dream. Key¬
boards tap furiously as chat
room participants rush to
decipher the layers of mean¬
ing. Taylor adds that death
is an archetypal metaphor
of psychospiritual growth
and change.
Taylor is negotiating with
AOL to create an online train¬
ing program for those who
guide others through group
dream analysis. "Only online
skills can be taught online," he
says. "But eventually, with the
availability of videophone tech¬
nology, these distinctions will
disappear." -Marissa Raderman
_ Top 10
Technologies Americans most appreciate
Product
% Totally Positive
1. Microwave oven
77,3
2, Universal remote control (TV/VCR)
66.6
3. Garage-door opener
64.6
4. Home telephone answering machine
617 _
5* Ear thermometer
59.5
6. Breath analyzer
S9.2
7* Programmable home thermostat
58.3
8. Call -waiting telephone service
56.4
9. Automatic payroll/
government check deposit
55.1
10. Supermarket price scanner
55.0
Results based on a survey that asked consumers which products have Improved
their lives most.
Source: Predowry Marketing : What Everyone in Business Needs to Know to Win
Todays Consumer, by C Britt Beemer (William Morrow, 1997).
- Gareth Branwyn
Meeeeeoww!
The Entrepreneur **
Next
Persian Kitty's Adult Links has become a
veritable Yahoo! of Web smut - a jumping-
off point for adult content. The material is
explicit, but equally eyebrow-raising is the
site's mastermind: Beth Mansfield, a Tacoma,
Washington, homemaker who is cashing in
on her serendipitous creation*
Mansfield, 36, created Persian Kitty to see how many people she
could pull onto one spot on the Web. The answer, in a word, is millions.
One month after she posted her homepage in 1995, Mansfield's ISP
kicked her off for attracting too much traffic* A few weeks later she
was up and running again, meticulously cataloging adult Web sites
by content and cost at www.persiankitty.com/.
Persian Kitty has prospered ever si nee. Today, it boasts a whopping
425,000 impressions a day and generates US$80,000 a month in adver¬
tising revenue. A former accountant, Mansfield takes a clinical view
of prospective Persian Kitty listings:"! look at the structure of a site,
see what they offer, and I'm out." - Matt Richtel
WIRED JUNE 199 7
1
I
I
I
“INDOOR
3AU.
i BAS
TO LEARN MORE A&OUT
INDOOR ?UNt GET ON
THE WEB AND VISIT THE
STATION @ SONY.COM
I
Start CkwmphnOi
C =i/)o
1. Tear ant this page and 2. Stoll up magazine and grip
crumple into a ball. Urap Lightly In hand- Note: Avoid
ball with tape for desired throwing the bat after you
hardness, Protective headgear- swing. It can inflict some
It 1 e your head, it's nasty paper cute on the fans,
your decision.
3. Recruit between 1 and 17
other players. Choose sides
using "eetiie-Beenie'' method.
Negotiate players' contracts,
if necessary.
4 .All rules of outdoor baseball
apply. And yes, spitting on the
ground is not only expected,
it's encouraged.
come on and play71
The 5 Station*
@ sorty. com
www.sony.com
play as Fernekes roots around a
Southern California salvage yard,
“absolutely orgasming" over all the
machines and equipment baking
in the sun/Omigodr he practically
moans, pointing to a giant glass cyl¬
inder with pipes and gauges inside.
“Look at that! It's a Hydra-Set Model
CFThe monstrous device once mea¬
sured fluid pressures in increments
of tens of thousands of pounds per
square inch. Form followed function,
and, by happy chance, it looks cook
Best of all, some New York style jun¬
kie is going to pay a pretty penny
for it. - Allen Whitman
The EKG Gallery is a haven for art aficionados
trolling for gorgeous technological garbage.
Gallery has it Situated on the fourth
floor of a warehouse in New York's
NoHo district, the EKG Gallery is a
haven for art aficionados trolling for
gorgeous technological garbage.
The gallery's centerpiece is a hand-
rubbed aluminum CJ8Q5 jet engine
from a 196Gs-era Convair 880, The
Fernekes seems an unlikely harbin¬
ger of retrotech design. But as a
fabricator and engineering whiz,
he has long been drawn to the
beauty of machines - and, working
with partner Stefan Rublowsky, he's
now translated that appreciation
into a burgeoning gallery business.
All that background comes into
Millions and millions of tons of
obsolete machinery are scat¬
tered about the country. Objects that
cost millions to design, build, use -
and, finally, trash - now lie inert in
scrap heaps and salvage yards. Some
of the junk is scientific equipment,
some is cast-off hardware from the
postwar military-industrial complex,
and some of it is very, very beautiful
Want a stylish brace of 4-foot-high
silver tubes once used in cryogenic
research? Or maybe a Teflon-coated
matting from a Trident missile canis¬
ter? Oran earthquake compression
bushing for highway bridges that
looks like an overgrown bar of soap?
Not to worry - Electrokinetics's EKG
thing is 16 feet long
and 4 feet wide and
weighs a hell of a lot,
but imagine what a
conversation piece it
will make! Plus, it's a
steal at only US$25,000.
“We're going after
people who are bored
with the art world," EKG
cofounder Leo Fernekes
says.“Our typical cus¬
tomer has always been
in love with technology
and now has the means to relish
that appreciation."
A 6-foot-3-inch wraith in black
jeans and enormous black boots,
| n a market full of digital heretics, Detroit-based Sigma6 is breaking
I the mold for interactive media and digital design. Positioning itself
in “the gap between mainstream media and underground culture," the
company's projects range from Web sites for the automotive indus¬
try to enhanced CDs and music videos for electronic music labels.
Sigma6 core members Russell Zack, William Tigertt III, Rod
Sanchez, and Jani Anderson have used their edge in the Motor City's
unsaturated market to fund independent projects and ventures.
"New media is the bridge," Zack exclaims/'WeVe had stuff on MTV
Europe and the Detroit Auto Show!"
Besides working with Detroit's techno underground and GMCs
truck division, 5igma6 is coming out with a fashion line called bit-
wear and a digital comic book for the Web. Rather than applying old
content to new technology, Sigmafi regards digital media as a cultural
conjunction. Says Zack:"Conceive-construct-connect is our idiom as
we count down to 2000." - Amitav Koul
WIRED JUNE 19 97
04
PHOTO ABOVE: KATHEEUNE MCGLVNH
Mi chael
Andretti ’ s Choi CG
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REALITY CHECK Edited by David Pescovitz
You've Heard the hype.
We asked the experts.
Here's the real timetable.
The Future of Dentistry
The first toothbrush was invented in China circa
AD 1000 and featured bristles made of horsehair.
Since then, dentistry has come a long way; smile-
straightening braces have evolved from gold metal
to clear plastic, millions of Water Piks have been
bought as gifts and never used, and the crinkled
toothpaste tube has been reengineered as the
freestanding pump. While we happily rot our teeth
with chewing gum, scientists continue to develop
new technologies that should make each checkup
better than the last. The focus, however, is on
prevention - so don't forget to floss.
Cavity-Repairing
Laser-Drilling
Effective Cure
Substitute for
Toothpaste
of Cavities
for Halitosis
Dental X Rays
Burrell
now
2010
2020
2020
Eichmiller
1999
unlikely
2007
now
Fox
now
2005
1999
now
Mandel
2003
2005
2000
2005
Newbrun
unlikely
unlikely
now
now
[Bottom Line
1999
unlikely
2005
2003
Kenneth Burrell
DDS; senior director
of the American Dental
Association's Council
on Scientific Affairs
Fred Eichmiller _
DDS; director of the
American Dental Associ¬
ation Health Foundation
Paffenbarger Research
Center
Christopher Fox
DMDh DMSc; director
of global professional
relations for the Colgate-
Palmolive Co,
Irwin D. Mandel
DDS; professor emeritus
at the Columbia Univer¬
sity School of Dental
and Oral Surgery
Ernest Newbrun
DMD, PhD; professor
emeritus at the Univer¬
sity of California at
San Francisco
In the next few years,
a new toothpaste called
Enamelon will face off
with Crest in the battle
for your mouth. The com¬
pany behind Enamelon
promises that the prod¬
uct which includes cal¬
cium and phosphate
in its formula, actually
prevents cavities by
rebuilding the surface
of the tooth. Does this
signify the death of
the dentist's drill? Wish¬
ful thinking. All of our
experts point out that
traditional fluoride tooth¬
pastes already decrease
demineralization and
i nc rea se rem i n era I iza ti o n .
According to Eichmiller,
newfangled Enamelon-
type toothpastes "will
most likely function in
much the same manner
but with much greater
efficiency." Unfortunately,
Fox adds, "once the caries
(tooth decay) progresses
to the state of cavitation,
or a physical hole in
the tooth, you'll need
more than toothpaste."
Bzzzzzzz..,.
Forty years since the first
air-turbine drills went
into service, that high-
pitched whine still sends
shivers down the spine
of anyone who has ever
had a cavity filled. So
what's next? According
to Mandel, lasers are
currently under study;
acceptance will depend
on the ease of use, cost,
and safety compared
with standard drilling.
Burrell notes that lasers
have even "demonstrated
effectiveness at sealing
pits and fissures on the
biting surfaces of molar
and premolar teeth/
On the other hand,
Eichmiller believes the
amount of energy that
must be generated to
ablate tooth structure
is "too large to ensure
survival of the tooth
vitality/ Lasers, adds
Newbrun, are more likely
to be used to control
bleeding.
It's no wonder dentists
wear doth masks - bad
breath is most commonly
caused by bacteria on
the tongue and teeth.
That's why a good brush
sometimes helps. But a
perfect cure for halitosis
Is unlikely, Mandel says,
since "the oral cavity
can't be sterilized/ Still,
Newbrun adds/the
common toothbrush
and a tongue scraper
are very effective in
controlling halitosis."
If you're one who enjoys
the swish-and-spit rou¬
tine, mouthwashes that
contain zinc compounds
are your best bet, Burrell
explains. For better
results, well have to wait
far a new antimicrobial.
And with a public that's
willing to buy into the
stigma of bad breath,
expect miracle mouth¬
washes to hit the shelves
again and again, 'Con¬
sumer demand will drive
companies to invest
heavily in this area," says
Fox. Well, that's one way
to look at it.
Do you get suspicious
when the X-ray techni¬
cian grabs the remote
control and scurries out
of the room? While the
radiation emitted from
dental X-ray machines
is not harmful in small
doses, better image
analysis combined with
new technologies may
reduce patients' expo¬
sure time. According to
Eichmiller, colored dyes
and electronic imped¬
ance detectors are use¬
ful in locating lesions.
In addition, Burrell
points out, digital imag¬
ing technology like MRI
is already in place, but
when it comes to dental
use/sufficient resolution
would be needed
because the early decay
lesions are extremely
small.'' Other methods
involving fiber-optic
systems and ultrasound
technology will reach
wide-scale acceptance
in less than a decade,
predicts Mandel, Until
then, please bite down
WIRED JUNE 19 9 7
08
■ - D DATA 5 ET COURTEST ttPMYT
macromediar 1
Approachable. Simply drag-and-drop*bebaviors directly onto objects
Powerful. Streaming Shockwave’ movies play as they download
FrwHand Graphics
rifFI 1
1 Jr a
:.PP,
im\
m IPs ?«[
i|P| ksg SvlL^w
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U S $ (MILLIONS)
Edited by Tim Barkow
Online Rundown
The results of Internet surveys finally seem to be stabilizing. As
Net fever rolls across the planet growth continues at an absurd
pace, but other statistics, such as the proportion of female users,
have leveled out. With sites like bookseller Amazon.com leading
the way, e-commerce seems to be gaining acceptance, and it's
probably j ust a matter of time before everyone's in on it.
SOURCE: IMTEJ.LIQUEST'5 WORLDWIDE 1 MTER N ET/O N - LINE TRACKING SERVICE
Primary -Access from Work
Heavy Users {More Than 20 Hoars per Week )
o 10 20 30 40 so
PERCENTAGE OF NET USERS RESPONDING
Uses E-Cammzrce
The Value of Privatization
One of the inescapable signs that the world is changing comes
as traditionally state-owned public telecommunications opera*
tors go private. Forty-four PTOs have made this shift since 1984,
generating almost US$1 59 billion, a third of which has come
from foreign investment.Privatization should improve global
telecommunications while helping to erase national borders.
SOURCE: INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS UNION PRIVATIZATION DATABASE
More Phones, More Money
The debate over establishing tariffs for ISPs is one the Bells may
never get over - win or lose. And though big telcos warn that
data traffic will destroy our phone system, they're really worried
about losing profits. But revenues from those wicked (usually
used for data) second phone lines are propping up local phone
monopolies quite well. So what are they complaining about?
SOURCE: WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION, IT1J
SOD |
Telephone Service Revenue
Naming Your Network Hosts
Excluding standard networking descriptors (such as www, which
dominates all other host names), these are some of the appel¬
lations your systems administrators love best. Most monikers
reveal a taste for mythology, perhaps D&D induced, but knowing
how inscrutable computer systems can be, homer probably refers
not to The Odyssey1 s author but to the father of Bart.
SOURCE: NETWORK WIZARDS t W WW. N W. COW/)
, £ r *
■
pluto
JL I J
wmum mmmm mbh
zeus
j W '
:Prr\
m
mercury
f rr,
ft
'/ - .
orion
w
0
herme s
phoenix
r m ^
thar
¥X*
merlin
homer |
r
NUMBER OF HOSTS
□ 0
WIRED JUNE 19 9 7
Read War and Peace
this summer...
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The second book of the prophetic
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Distributed by Publishers Group West
GEEK PAGE
By Mark Frauenfelder
m
ita 5V-i* £lttr
exvts ftflu
c® ^rci.
'Weis.
IW \ki
fritr to VuiAdL
tV 4yjur^
to tfi if *
One of the nicer attributes
of search engines is the
massive army of inexpensive,
uncomplaining software bots
you can employ to troll the
Net, collecting textual content
These
bots,
however, are next to useless
when it comes to indexing the
Net's millions of photographs,
drawings, and videoclips. And
since you can't search for them,
images do not exist as research-
able - or even useful - online
content.
To construct an image index,
human beings must be hired
to sit at computers and plow
through the Net, cataloging
pictures one by one. Yahoo!
and other search engines offer
small image databases, but as
long as meatbots - instead of
softbots - are used to construct
online image libraries, com¬
prehensive indices will remain
prohibitively expensive.
Some research programs,
such as VIR Image Engine from
Virage Inc. and Columbia Uni¬
versity's VisuatSFEk, offer con¬
tent retrieval based on a user's
request for images that con¬
tain a specified combination
of color, shape, and texture*
Querying one of these image
databases amounts to drawing
a rough sketch of the kind of
visual you're looking for. Other
programs compare a sample
picture's content with other
known images from a compari¬
son database*
These kinds of approaches
are useful in certain limited
applications, but what's really
needed is a program that can
automatically analyze a pre¬
viously unclassified image
file and describe what's in
the picture without human
assistance*
Two university researchers
have achieved encouraging
results in content-based image
Content-Based Image Retrieval
In other words, how the Naked People Finder works.
retrieval with a program that
searches for a very specific
type of image: naked people.
David Forsyth, an associate
professor in UC Berkeley's com¬
puter science department, and
Margaret Fleck, an associate
professor of computer science
at the University of Iowa, have
jointly developed a program,
colloquially called the Naked
People Finder (tmp.cs.berkeley
.edu/~daf/peopie.html)f that is
designed to search through
the files of an image database
and retrieve pictures contain¬
ing pictures of nudes.
Forsyth explains that the
consistency of skin color in
most scanned pom images
makes it an excellent first
choice to test the finder
algorithm. Another reason
for using pornography, says
Forsyth, is "the large sample
set - I got it from the Net."
The Naked People Finder
does its job by first looking
for image files that contain
targe regions of skin-colored
pixels. "If you ignore how dark
or light it is, skin has a very
constant color," says Fleck.
"The Naked People algorithm
looks for an absence of strong
texture." In a sample set of
565 images of naked people
and 4,289 control images (of
landscapes, animals, indus¬
trial sites, clothed people, et
cetera), the skin filter selected
448 nude shots and 485 con¬
trol images. The skin filter
picked out 79 percent of the
naked people - not bad, con¬
sidering the range of back¬
grounds, textures, and colors
found in the samples.
But Fleck and Forsyth's pro¬
gram incorrectly tagged 11.3
percent of the control images
as naked people as well, which
explains why the program also
includes a geometric filter that
goes to work on the set of sel¬
ected skin images. This filter
targets areas tagged by the
skin filter and attempts to dis¬
cern whether limb segments
exist within those areas.
To do this, the filter assumes
that the human body basically
consists of cylinders, if the pro¬
gram finds a skin-colored cyl¬
inder, then it looks for another
cylinder nearby," explains For¬
syth. It then tries to group the
cylinders into configurations
within the human body's geo¬
metric constraints, which have
been modeled in the comput¬
er as a "body plan." If it finds a
sufficiently large configuration
that meets the body plan's cri¬
teria, the image is tagged as a
picture of a naked person.
In essence, the two-part
system uses the same visual
cues - color and large, recog¬
nizable shapes - that people
use when skimming through
a collection of images for a
particular type of picture.
The program's geometry
fitter ts a mixed blessing, how¬
ever, because while overall
it is more accurate, reducing
the number of false positives,
it also reduces the total num¬
ber of identified nudes. The
geometry fitter screened out
62.5 percent of the false pos¬
itives, so only 4,2 percent of
the control images were sel¬
ected. But the filter also threw
out 36 percent of the nudes
selected by the skin filter,
dropping the yield from 79
to 43 percent.
The 4 percent of false pos¬
itives included some "with
the right color and elongated
shapes," says Fleck, such as
"stalactites, pumpkins, and
desserts - especially pinkish-
colored ones," The Naked
People Finder team believes
that it can improve the pro¬
gram's overall performance
by tweaking the existing
algorithms, combining the
program with a system for
analyzing the text that's
often included with images,
or incorporating one of the
many human-face-detection
algorithms under develop¬
ment around the world.
Fleck and Forsyth are now
creating finders for animals
other than humans. Their
horse finder, for example,
employs a learned body plan,
as opposed to a hand-coded
body plan like that used in
the Naked People Finder. In
other words, they developed
the computer model used to
represent a horse by feeding
image data to the program
and applying statistical learn¬
ing theory to converge on
a representation of a horse's
structure. The horse finder
program "is capable of rec¬
ognizing horses in different
aspects," says Forsyth, but
"it isn't smart enough to tell
a horse from a deer."
The ultimate goal of their
research, Forsyth adds, is
to create a general program
that can examine any image
file and "tell you what's in it -
if it contains a person, or two
jaguars - or something else,"
As multimedia content
becomes a greater force on
the Web, it will be even more
important that images and
video be searchable - other¬
wise, we lose the real value
of digital content.
But if Fleck and Forsyth's
work continues as promisingly
as it has begun, we may soon
see commercial versions of
algorithm-based image search
engines that can dig through
the Web automatically, finally
making images as useful in
the electronic sphere as online
text has become. ■ ■ ■
Mark Frauenfelder [mark
@ wired. com) is an editor at
Hardwired and an editor-at-
large for Wired News.
□ 2
WIRED JUNE 1997
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681 andersen drive
Pittsburgh Pennsylvania 15220
412-921-2900 • 1-888-ecorp4u
http://www.e-corp.com
)ownload the
full-version
* mail 97
from our website
FOLLOW THE MONEY
Telecom Calls
This may be the digital age,
but the data dispatched
through your modem still trav¬
els over analog telephone lines.
That will soon change. Who is
likely to supply the d igital lines?
By Michael Murphy
the telephone company with the
equipment to build those lines?
Some very interesting invest¬
ment opportunities.
After years of slow change
and steady, modest growth, the
telecommunications equipment
market is booming, driven by
Sales in the developing world
are growing fast. But thanks
to deregulation and technical
Improvements, the developed
markets - which account for
only 14 percent of the world's
population - still consume 85
percent of equipment sales.
A telecom primer
The US telephone network has
three major components; the
local-access network, the public
switched phone network (PSTN)
backbone, and the Advanced
Intelligent Network.
The Wired Interactive Technology Fund (TWITS)
Company
Primary easiness
Symbol
Shares
(lose Apr 1
A State Mar 3
Action
Adobe Systems Inc
Software
ADBE
5.000
39%
+ 3%
hold
Applied Materials Inc
Semiconductor equip.
AMAT
4,000
47 %.
~ 4%
hold
Diamond Multimedia
Multimedia hw
DIMD
7,000
8ft
- 4%.
hold
Intel Corporation
Microchips
INK
1,500
139 Yu
- 6 ft.
hold
LSI Logic Corporation
Semiconductors
LSI
7, BOO
35
+ ft
hold
Macromedia Inc.
Multimedia sw
MACR
14,000
9
- %
hold
Mattson Technology
Semiconductor equip.
MTSN
30,000
9
- ft
bold
Gctel Communications
Voice hw/sw
0CTL
5,800
15 7.
- 3
bold
Sequana Therapeutics Inc
Biotech
5QNA
10,000
B
- 1ft
bold
New Stocks
Informix Corporation
Database sw
IFMX
3,000
9%
buy
Premisys Commun ication Inc Telecom equ Ip.
PRMS
17,000
6
buy
Cash Holding
$26,64 6.SB
Portfolio Value
$lr717,5%.BB
(+73.76% overall)
- 5.40%
legend: This fund started with
US$1 million on December
1,im. Wear
e trading on
i a monthly basis, so profits and f
esses will
be reflected monthly, with prof
its reinvested in the fund or
in new stock!
TWITS is a model
established by Wired,
not art officially
traded pa rtf alio,
Michael Murphy is
a professional money
manager who may
have 2 personal inter¬
est in stocks listed in
TWITS or mentioned
in this column.
Wired readers who
use this information
for investment
detisi ons da so
at their awn risk.
a combination of deregulation,
new technologies, and strong
international demand.
Worldwide telecommuni¬
cations spending is divided
between equipment and ser¬
vices, For every dollar spent
on equipment - art estimated
US$180 billion in 1 997 - telcos
spend another $5 on local and
long distance calls, directory
assistance, and other services.
Worldwide services spending
should grow 10 percent a year
for the next few years, driven
by falling prices in developed
countries and first-time avail¬
ability in developing nations.
Overall equipment sales will
expand at twice that rate as
competitors, scrapping for mar¬
ket share, race to offer new and
improved services.
The local-access system, or
local loop, carries voice and data
traffic from the subscriber to
the central office, which routes
local calls and connects non¬
local long distance traffic to
the PSTN for transmission to
other central offices.
For nearly a century ,the stan¬
dard connection to the central
office has been a pair of twisted
copper wires carrying a 64-Kbps
analog signai.This narrowband
or voiceband subscriber line is
connected to a line card in the
local exchange switch at the
central office.
Historically, the ratio of line
cards to PSTN connections has
been about 4-to-l, because sta¬
tistics showed that a typical per¬
son makes about five nonlocal
10-minute calls a day. When a
call is placed, the local switch
creates a circuit, dedicating one
of the PSTN connections to the
call. If 25 percent of the sub¬
scribers are on the line, every¬
one else gets a busy signal.
More recently, the industry
has developed alternate routes
to the central office to circum¬
vent the analog line card and
digitally switch into the PSTN.
Pairgaln technologies, which
convert analog traffic to digital,
can carry 32 conversations. This
increases capacity without the
expense of increasing the num¬
ber of wires.
The business P8X (private
branch exchange) usually con¬
nects to the central office via
a digital T1 line at 1.54 Mbps.
Other technologies that extend
digital transmission Into the
local network include ISDN for
128- Kbps service over two dedi¬
cated channels connected to
the local exchange switch, ADSL
for higher speeds up to 8.4 Mbps,
and DLC - digital loop carriers -
connecting 96 or more narrow-
band lines onto a high-speed
trunk (consisting of fourTls}
and then to the central office.
These technologies serve dif¬
ferent tiers of service at differ¬
ent price points, and all will be
part of the evolving telecom
landscape.
But back to investing
In the equipment sector, the big
seven providers include Lucent
(formerly AT&T), Northern Tele¬
com, Alcatel, Siemens, Ericsson,
Fujitsu, and NEC. These vendors
make or acquire the access,
switching, and transmission
technologies necessary to build
a network from end to end. Big,
diversified, and well followed,
these companies tend to be
fairly valued, so Pm not buying
any of them right now. Good
values do arise from time to
time. Look for a chance to buy
companies at less than eight
times growth flow (earnings
per share plus R&D per share)
with sales growing at least 15
percent each year.
Small companies are driving
the market in access devices,
which concentrate traffic from
different sources onto digital
trunks connected to the central
office. Many access devices
connect one of the broadband
data-transmission standards like
asynchronous transfer mode or
frame relay to the switched tele¬
phone network In this area 1 like
Sync Research (SVNX); its stock
is down from $20 last Novem¬
ber to less than $4 because of
a flat fourth quarter, which over¬
whelmed the good news of an
important network contract
from Visa International,
More sophisticated devices
offer integrated access for mul¬
tiple forms of data and voice
traffic transmitted over digital
trunks to the central office. The
leading company is Premisys
Communications (PRMS), whose
stock tumbled from $65 to less
than $8 when its major reseller,
Paradyne, lost a couple of con¬
tract bids. Premisys competes
with Newbridge Networks,Tel-
labs, and Nokia, but offers the
most flexible and powerful inte¬
grated access solution. Buy both
5YNX and PRMS up to $12.
TWIT$
The portfolio is underweighted
in communications stocks, which
had been overvalued for months
before coming down hard in
the first quarter. I am adding
1 7,000 shares of Premisys. The
new advanced object relational
database made by Informix
(IFMX) can handle any type of
data, including multimedia infor¬
mation, and gives the company
a substantia! technology lead.
I am buying 3,000 shares, m m m
Michael Murphy is a money man¬
ager who publishes the California
Technology Stock Letter in Half
Moon Bay, California .
WIRED JUNE 1997
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The Wall Street journal Interne the Edition^ open a Schwab account (regular or eSchwah'*) with $5,000 or more, or bring $ 5ft GO to an existing Schwab account by June 30t 1997. ©1997 Charles Schwab
& Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Member SIPC/NYSE. (6/97)
www.schwab.com
Charles Schwab
The Way It Should Be.
DEDUCTIBLE JUNKETS Edited by Jesse Freund
Beyond the Brain
Alternative artificial lifestyles
(see Wired 5,05)
June 19-21 E3; Atlanta. "June 26-29 Shareware Industry Confer¬
ence '97; Warwick, Rhode Island. -June 30-July 3 International
Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law; Melbourne, Aus¬
tralia." July 5-6 Consciousness Reframed: Art and Consciousness
rn the Post-Biological Era; Newport Wales. ■ July 13-16 Genetic
Programming 1997 Conference; Stanford, California.
Artificial intelligence suffers
from its reliance on the much-
ballyhooed human brain, so say
the organizers of the European
Conference on Artificial Life in
Brighton, England. In their attempt
to build thinking machines, Al
researchers often forgo the valu¬
able experiences of other carbon-
based life-forms. However, a-life
advocate and event chair Inman
Harvey says that we "see the ratio¬
nality of humans as an inci¬
dental and often
over-rated charac¬
teristic/1
Artificial-
life theo¬
rists study
the most
basic facets
and forms
of life -
such as the
traits of slime
molds, insects,
and mammals -
and borrow not just
intelligence but adaptive
behaviors to build into artificial
beings. Whereas Afers build com¬
puter programs that can play
chess, a- lifers synthesize robots
that can cross a street without
getting creamed.
Modeling and re-creating bio¬
logical phenomena in computers,
a-lifers pursue two goals; to use
these models to better understand
real-life issues, and to incorporate
the ideas of organic systems into
the development of computer
hardware and software, medicine,
and nanotechnology.
At ECAL, presentations on topics
such as evolutionary computation,
swarm intelligence, and collective
behavior will shed light on life
processes. And demonstrations
by companies like Millennium -
the team behind the a-life game
Creatures, which programs adap¬
tive behavior into com-
m puter-generated
characters - will
uncover some
marketable
aspects of
artificiai-life
theory.
Perhaps
most excit¬
ing, the First
Autonomous
Robotics Football
Tournament will
be held in conjunction
with ECAL. The robot that
uses vision, path planning, and
strategy to score the most points
will win US$1, 000. It's artificial
intelligence versus artificial life.
Rational thought meets slime
mold. And the winner? Both, of
course.
Registration; UK£35G (US$560). Contact:
email ecal97@cogs.susx.ac.uk, on the Web
at wwwxogs.susx.ac.uk/ecaf97.
[July 13-16 j
What are the metaphysical implications of worldwide
connectivity? Is the Internet the ultimate metaphor for God? At
this ecclesiastical event - sponsored by the Association for Reli¬
gion and Intellectual Life - technologists and theologians will
explore the impact of communications systems on human inter¬
action with others and, ultimately, with God. Registration: US$170.
Contact; + 1 {91 4} 235 1439, fax +1 {91 4) 235 1 584, email aril
@ecunet.org, on the Web at www,arii.org Z,
[July 17-19 [
The World Future Society's annual conference
turns wild speculation into vocation. If you fancy yourself a
futurist or just like hanging out with these forward-thinkers,
don't miss this crystal-ball affair, featuring keynote speeches by
Global Business Network president Peter Schwartz and digital-
age author Hazel Henderson. Registration: US$345 through June
30,$395 through July 17. Contact; +1 (301} 656 8274, fax +1 {301}
951 0394, email wf sin fo@ wfs.org, on the Web at www.wfs.org/wfs.
July 28 31 1
See information at left.
August 3-0 This animation extravaganza
is a must for all types of graphics gurus. Check out the Electric
Garden, which showcases the latest graphics applications and
Interactive technologies. And tune into the Computer Animation
Festival, where video artists premiere some of the world's finest
computer-generated work. Leap to LA and watch the future of
eye candy come alive. Registration; US$580 through June 27, $720
through August 8. Contact; + 1 (312} 321 6830, fax +1 (312) 321
6876, on the Web at www.siggraph.org/s97.
| August BOO ] So
you wanna be a hacker? Find out what it takes at this big hack
attack sponsored by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Emmanuel Gold¬
stein and others share legends, swap tech knowledge, and gener¬
ally cause mischief HOPE convenes only every few years, so don't
sleep through this meeting. Registration; US$20. Contact; email
emmanuel@2600.cotn, on the Web at www,2600xom/.
j August 13-14 ( Go beyond the
banner at this Jupiter Communications-sponsored schmoozathon.
New-media buyers will rub elbows with sellers, and speeches like
fast year's keynote by AOL president Ted Leonsis will tell advertis-
5 & 7
pirns
Extreme Sport
Robots play soccer. So what?
Let's see them try to play a
real sport. At the Octopush
Club in Brighton, England,
members play an under¬
water form of hockey that
would challenge the most
advanced bot.
Invented in 1954 by Brit¬
ish diver Alan Blake, octo¬
pus h was originally intended
to keep military divers in
shape during the long win¬
ter months. Today's players
do it for fun. Strapping on
snorkeling gear, they dive
to the bottom of a full-sized
pool and use sticks to pass
a 5-pound metal puck -
which octop ushers call a
squid (go figure) - toward
the opposing team's goal.
Octo push's large and immer¬
sive 3-D environment would
tax any state-of-the-art
robot's path planning.
This summer, the national
octopush tournament will
be held near London, Call it
the Super Bowl of under¬
water hockey. Check the date
of this and other Brighton
Octopush Club extravagan¬
zas at www.thenet.co.uk
/-squid/oaoMmUx'W be
well worth the effort. Some
poolside shenanigans, along
with a few tasty mai tals,
should be the perfect anti¬
dote to the mechanical
machinations of robot
soccer players, - Jesse Freund
ers how to redirect their old-media monies to online ventures.
Registration; US$1,240, Contact; + 1 {212) 780 6060 ext. 154, fax
+1 (212) 7 SO 6075, email jupiter@jup.com.
September 8-11 Electronic Commerce World; Philadelphia,
Contact: +1 (954) 925 5900, on the Web at pwr.com/ediworld
/EDlCQNF LhtmL* September 8-14 Telecom Interactive 97; Geneva.
Contact: +41 (22) 730 6161 r on the Web at wwwJtu ch/TELECOM.
September 11-12 infaWARcon; Vienna, Virginia, Contact; +1 (717)
241 3226, email iafowarcon@nc$axom,a September 15 Advanced
Surveillance Technologies Conference; Brussels, Contact: +1 (202)
544 9240, email pi@privacy.org.
Got a good junket? Email yunkers@wrred.com.
□ e
WIRED JUNE 1997
ULUS THAT I DM: TDNV KLASSEM
AH iTov^
mords and pictures
lWEJ/A
U P D ATA
Edited by Jessie Scanlon
High-Definition
Deception
The HDTV swindle con¬
tinued fn March when
the Oh-So-Grand
Alliance of TV broad¬
casters announced its
timetable for introduc¬
ing the new standard:
most stations now say
they won't begin offer¬
ing HDTV until after
2000, When the FCC
balked, the National
Association of Broad¬
casters revised the plan,
slightly: within 18 to 24
months. 43 percent of
US households will be
surfing high-definition
cha nnels. Th i s ma rg i n-
ally faster timetable
forced manufacturers
Thomson Consumer
Electronics Inc. and Pana¬
sonic to delay plans to
offer HDTV sets in 1998,
More important,
the broadcast industry's
foot-dragging makes
a farce of Its deal with
the FCC: high-quality
digital programming
in exchange for addi¬
tional digital spectrum
- at no cost. Vet the FCC
is still committed to
distributing new digital
channels to every TV
station fn the country.
For the consumer,
only one thing is dear:
HDTV - or hogtied digi¬
tal television - won t
be a reality for years.
[ORIGINAL STORY IN
WIRED 5.02. PAGE 57 ]
WIRED JUNE 19
ALA v.Pataki: A Case of Indecency
Checked Out
Once hailed as a vision-
If you popped open the Moet & Chandon when a
Philadelphia federal court struck down the Commu¬
nications Decency Act last June ... if you thought the
Internet was safe from the dark forces of censorship
.„ think again. In the past two years, at least 1 7 states
have passed or are considering legislation to restrict
sexually oriented content on the Net. Some of these
bills - aimed at pedophiles vending kiddie porn via
computers - are laudable updates to existing child
pornography laws. But New York, Georgia, Oklahoma,
Virginia, and Maryland have passed laws that impose
censorship as far-reaching as what the Philadelphia
court found unconstitutional.
Enacted last fall, Section 235.21 (3) of the New York
State Penal Code makes it a crime to disseminate
information "harmful to minors" via computer, Vro-
lation of the statute is a felony, punishable by up to
four years in prison. Civil libertarians were quick to
respond. In early March, the American Library Associ¬
ation, along with the Westchester Library System, the
Association of American Publishers and others, filed
ALA v. Pataki in the US District Court. "Telecom muni-
cation is going to be a primary means of communica¬
tion in the 21 st century," argues Judith Krug, director
of the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom. "Librarians
cannot live under laws that hold them liable for jail
sentences if they use a computer to make indecent'
information available to people younger than 18. ,r
The New York law makes no attempt to distinguish
between material inappropriate for a 5- or 6-year-old
but suitable for a teenager. More troubling, the stat¬
ute's definition of "harmful" material is broad enough
to include information on AIDS, family planning, and
homosexuality.
The ALA fears the legislation will prompt librarians
to pull the plug on Internet connections rather than face
jail time. "It's a serious situation," Krug says, "because
a library's responsibility is to make available ideas and
information across the spectrum. This law suppresses
information under the guise of protecting minors."
Given the open and unreg¬
ulated nature of the Internet,
preventing indecent material
from going to kids means pre¬
venting it from going to any¬
body, including adults. At an
April 3 hearing, Ann Beeson,
the ACLU lawyer representing
the plaintiffs, argued that "the
law criminalizes speech that is
constitutionally protected,"
adding that "the Supreme Court
has held that you can't reduce
all communication to a level
suitable for a 6-year-old."
If state laws such as New
York's are allowed to stand,
Beeson believes, the chilling
effect on libraries - and on all
free speech - could be even
worse than that of the CDA
because "the most restrictive
state regulations will become
ary of the "library of
the future/' then mired
in controversy over
San Francisco’s US$140
million new facility,
Ken Dow! in resigned as
the city's chief librarian
in January. Since the
main library opened
in April 1996. patrons
have complained of
long lines and computer
glitches, while biblio¬
philes - led by novelist
Nicholson Baker -
declaimed the purging
of millions of books.
But Do wl In’s coup de
grace was the reported
$2.8 million deficit.
The book czar attributes
the overspending to
increased staffing costs
(library use is up 300
percent) /'We went from
a DC-3 to a 747." says
Dowfin.The librarians
the norm." Someone in Massa¬
chusetts who posts material
that is "indecent" in Oklahoma
could be extradited to the pan¬
handle state.
Beeson expects a decision
by early summer. Meanwhile,
the Supreme Court opinion on
the Communications Decency
Act is expected in June or July.
But even a ruling that the CDA is unconstitutional
won't automatically void the New York law. As Beeson
points out, a Supreme Court opinion striking down
the CDA will not prevent state legislators from pass¬
ing unconstitutional statutes. Net censorship will
have to be fought state by state. - Hal Stacker
union, meanwhile, cites
bad management and
overinvestment in costly
computers.
Dowlin - still a true
believer In digital librar¬
ies - is running for pres¬
ident of the American
Library Association.
[ORIGINAL STORY IN
WJftfO TJ, PAGE 62,]
[ORIGINAL STORY IN WIRED 4.03, PAGE 1 04. ]
1 7
America
Still Online
They say that having
the shit kicked out of
you builds character
In America Online's
case, the experience
has strengthened the
company's technolog¬
ical infrastructure, and
its membership base
is holding at 8 million.
Following months of
criticism over pro¬
longed busy signals
and technological
shortcomings - not to
mention class-action
suits and fights with
00
state attorneys general
over consumer fraud -
AQL appears bruised
but not beaten.
In fact, analysts say
the recent pummeJing
hdpedtbe company.lt
spurred much -needed
equipment upgrades,
and, more important,
the publicity spread the
word among would-be
netizens that AQL is
the most popular and
user-friendly access
provide rTAQL's come
through relatively
unscathed/ says Brian
Oakes, an analyst at
Lehman Brothers, Tress
reports that people are
stiil dying to get in just
create intrigue/
Competitors such
as CompuServe and
AT&T WorldNet Service
attempted to stir up
a tittle intrigue of their
own by claiming they'd
attracted thousands of
disenchanted AOLers.
Perhaps. But as America
Online gets its act
together, the chickens,
so to s pea k, a re com i n g
home to roost,
[ORIGINAL STORY IN
WIRED AM, PAGE 254.]
IMAGES: BACKGROUND: GLENN SA I H : TOP RIGHT: STUART CUDLHt;TOP LEFT: lOU BEACH: BELOW: STEVE SPEER
DESKTOP WORKSTATION
$7,495
Two words that might describe your feeling when yon see a powerful Silicon Graphics
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IMAGE PROCESSING ENGINE
VIDEO COMPRESSION ENGINE
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44M8 ECC SDR AH
IGR SCSI SYSTEM DISK
IT" MONITOR, nsaXION
I 0QB ASETXfl ORA SET ETHERNET
CD-ROM
workstation at this price, but will definitely describe your feeling once you plug it in. It’s a
feeling brought on by the 02'" workstation’s stunning combination of GPU and graphics
performance, along with unparalleled video and imaging capabilities. So whether you design
complex 3D animations, composite film resolution images, create 2D graphics for the evening
news or produce multimedia presentations, 02 delivers the power to pursue “what if?”
scenarios with an innovative Unified Memory Architecture and either a MIPS® R5000™ or
more powerful MIPS* R 100 00™ CPU. So see our Web site or call us for more information
at 8 00. 636. 8184, Dept. LS0055. And don’t worry if you’re out of breath. We're used to it.
» SiiiconGraphics
Computer Systems
see what's possible
Sihcrtfi Graphic! md the Sil con Graphic! Ic^o
TedrolDjjei, fc>c Screen Irrip- -caunieiy of Nl
sd trademark* artd O! and Si
'hat's pjiilbJe ire trademark* of Hktm Graphics. Iht, MJ’Smdlht MIPS ftjSC CirtNiS FV>w»f h*e .■» rtfu.re I rr*(t*rrtiri,t
w ^ ^
« I W SifKoti Graphic* Inc. All rigtria
CYBER RIGHTS NOW Edited by Todd Lappin
www.wired.com/ 5.06/crn/
Let It Grow
US Senator Ron Wyden [D-Ore-
gon) and Representative Chris¬
topher Cox (R-California) have
introduced legislation calling
for an indefinite moratorium
on new taxes on electronic
commerce. The House and Sen¬
ate bills - both called the Inter¬
net Tax Freedom Act - seek
to establish a national policy
against state and local interfer¬
ence with interstate commerce
on the Internet/' The proposed
legislation also prohibits the FCC
from regulating prices charged
by internet service providers
and calls for the Clinton admin¬
istration to seek international
trade agreements that make all
internet activity free of taxes,
tariffs, and trade barriers.
Made in America?
Japan's Justice Ministry is rally¬
ing support for an anticrime bill
that would give police extensive
wiretap powers - a major depar¬
ture given the country's consti¬
tutional guarantees for Secrecy
of any means of communica¬
tions/’ According to activist
Toshimaru Ggura, Japanese cops
are modeling their proposals on
US wiretap law, specifically the
1 994 Communications Assis¬
tance for Law Enforcement Act
(CALEAJ.The NSA helped sculpt
CALEAs language, which begs
the questions Is Japan's wiretap
bill another one of the MSA's
covert operations?
We Are the World
The fight for civil liberties In
cyberspace knows no borders.
The Global Internet Liberty Cam¬
paign, or GILC, is an online advo¬
cacy coalition representing 25
member organizations, includ¬
ing the ACLU, EPIC, EFF, Amnesty
International, Human Rights
Watch, and Privacy International.
Committed to the defense of
free speech, privacy, unrestricted
encryption, and information
access, GILC has focused its
efforts on inter national policy¬
making bodies such the G-7,
OECD, and the European Union.
Find out more at www.gifc.orgA
Critical Mess
Sorting out the domain name system.
The Internet's domain name
system (DNS) is bursting at
the seams, and if the problem
isn't fixed soon, governments
may assert control over a fun-
By Roderick Simpson
damental aspect of Internet
architecture/The Net's "positive
anarchy" has become an inter¬
national liability, and nation¬
states around the world are
salivating at the prospect of
Stepping in to end the chaos.
The current crisis can be
traced back to the early 1 980s,
when DNS was developed to
help Internet users find one
another by mapping prosaic
names to numerical addresses
- the internet Protocol assign¬
ments given to each network
host. Thus, for example, the
domain name whitehouse.gov
points to the IP address 1 98,1 37
.240.91 . And just as whitehouse
is a domain - a second-level
domain, actually - so too is the
.gov attached to it In fact, seven
such "generic" top-level domains
(gTLDs} were created in all, inclu¬
ding .com, ,org, .edu, .mil, and
so forth. The original assumption
was that seven gTLDs would
operate in perpetuity, without
the need to create any more.
Few people then expected
the Internet to grow into a mass
medium. But today, .com has
become the most popular home
for the world's online commer¬
cial endeavors, leaving fewer
and fewer choices that reflect
company trademarks. As the
number of available names has
diminished, lawyers and con
artists have used trademark-
infringement lawsuits and extor¬
tion attempts to exploit the
scarcity. Meanwhile, Network
Solutions Inc. - the for-profit
company that has maintained
the gTLD registry since 1 995 -
has been reaping fat rewards
from its DNS monopoly.
Internet gurus have called for
the creation of new gTLDs to alle¬
viate the congestion, but DNS Is
managed by a labyrinth of com¬
mittees and working groups.
Irresolute and lacking a clear
chain of command, this system
has allowed fringe elements to
fill the vacuum, creating un sanc¬
tioned, "rogue" DNS registries
and gTLDs (such as *cofp, .club,
and .sex) to challenge Network
Solutions and its various paper-
tiger oversight organizations.
Faced with the prospect of
a DNS free-for-all, a closed-door
group of elite Net policymakers
convened in late 1996 and early
'97 under the name International
Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) to sort
through the muck and recom¬
mend future DNS structures.
The IAHC recommended the
creation of seven new gTLDs to
be split between 28 new regis¬
tries. Trouble is, some of the pro¬
posed gTLDs will only redouble
the trademark woes of existing
.com occupants by forcing them
to also set up shop on iirm and
.store. Such implications prompt¬
ed the International Trademark
Association to issue a follow-up
report which anxiously noted
that "the world is shrinking!"
Sorting out the DNS mess
is no easy task. Trade mark law,
long bound by notions of physi¬
cal space and dissociated mar¬
kets, is careening ass-first into
cyberspace, which erases both.
David Johnson and David Post,
coauthors of the seminal paper
"Law and Borders: The Rise of
Law in Cyberspace," write that
domain names generate "a new
type of property akin to trade¬
mark rights, but which is not
inherently tied to the trademark
law of any given country."
This uncertainty - coupled
with the indecision and clumsi¬
ness of the Internet architecture
community - is making govern¬
ments nervous, and some have
started dropping hints that it
might be time to take over the
entire DNS process.
A report leaked to Commun'h
cationsWeek International from
the Paris-based Organization
for Economic Cooperation and
Development stated that "the
role of governments is to ensure
that the administration and
operation of the DNS is stable
and that competition occurs in
a fair and open manner." As we
go to press, 80 delegates are
preparing to attend the OECD's
first intergovernmental meeting
to discuss DNS alternatives.
Here in the US, federal agen¬
cies are keeping dose tabs on the
DNS controversy. The US Patent
and Trademark Office, the Federal
Communications Commission,
the Federal Trade Commission,
and Ira Magaziner's e-commerce
policy group have all expressed
concern over the problem, and
these agencies are now collabo¬
rating with a newly formed Fed¬
eral Interagency Working Group
on Domain Names to make sure
the system is under control. Pri¬
vately, US officials say the lAHC's
proposal to create 28 new gTLD
registries is a step in the right
direction, but they insist that
the overall framework for man¬
aging DNS should be subject
to federal supervision.
If the DNS discord continues,
the stage could be set for a re¬
prise of the spectrum wars of the
1 920s and '30s - a process that
ultimately gave the FCC authority
to license the ether as a "public
resource" and regulate content
transmitted over public airwaves.
If the Internet community can't
sort out the DNS problem on its
own - quickly - then we may be
handing governments a conve¬
nient invitation to sort out the
mess ... once and for all. ■ ■ ■
Roderick Simpson (madean@we1l
.com) writes regularly for Wired.
□ 2
WIRED JUNE 1997
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ELECT RO SPHERE
Name-o-rama™
How do they come up with names like
Pentium and AirTouch?
By Alex Frankel
5.06/namemathme7)
The booming high tech
world h running out of
trademarkable names.
Its turning to a nascent
naming industry that's
coming up with the few
words that stand out
from the UniMobil
TeleDigiComUnk soup.
At 9 a.m. sharp in Sausalito, on the San
Francisco Bay, six people hunker around
a wooden conference table in a giant green
vault of a room once used by the navy and
now used by Lexicon Branding Inc. As the
floor heaters warm the crisp air, the group
faces the imminent task: to name a com¬
puter network targeted at small businesses.
The assembled team
- including an actress,
a computer program¬
mer, a writer, and
three Lexicon staffers
- seems alert, ready.
The morning’s orders,
delivered by the cof¬
fee-sipping team
leader, include an
appeal lo avoid the
hackneyed word net
in the day's brain¬
storming session. The
bill for service: US$30,000.
The team leader starts by asking what a
computer network really does. For a minute
the question hangs in the air like a Zen
koan, then the team members jump in.
Someone makes the comparison to a home
intercom system. The network is envisioned
as a light-rail system, as a steel infrastruc¬
ture, as a bible. The group moves rapidly
through a slew of creative antics. With
soft, calming New Age music in the back¬
ground, the namers try their hand at writ¬
ing advertising copy, they build on punchy
tag lines, they watch the client’s television
ads. And then they write haiku poetry:
The fabric of work
Gliding effortlessly fast
Zigging and zagging
By midmorning, the creatives have
churned out hundreds of candidate names:
Ensemble, Copernicus, Socket, Tango,
Chainlink. The object is not so much to
find the ultimate solution, but to keep the
momentum going and build on the sugges¬
tions of others. “What about blackberry ?”
asks one consultant. “1 see the network as
a link of vines and tendrils. Oooh, what
about tendril?" The session proceeds.
Finding the right name for a company or
product can be critical in the deathly com¬
petitive high tech world. The most success¬
ful names become winning brands and the
cornerstones of full-blown advertising and
marketing strategies. Just 10 years ago, the
industry held little mass consumer appeal,
but the Digital Revolution has created the
need for increased marketing to consumers
- and itTs forced companies to think hard
about just what is in a name.
As the pool of registered trademarks
expands, the difficulty in finding a suitable
name increases. The Trademark Law Revi¬
sion Act of 1988 is perhaps most responsi¬
ble for the boom in the naming business.
Since November 1989, entities have been
able to apply for a trademark based on
their “intent to use” it within 36 months -
eliminating the need to have an actual
product in the works. So even more names
have been locked out of the running. Year¬
ly trademark applications received by the
United States Patent and Trademark Office
have more than doubled since 1989, climb¬
ing front 85,000 in 1989 to more than
200,000 in 1996.
PowerBook, Compaq, AirTouch: these
high tech corporate monikers are the
results of lengthy research and consulting
offered by a growing number of firms spe¬
cializing in naming. The San Francisco Bay
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area, with Silicon Valley's robust product-
driven economy, has the world’s most con¬
centrated base of neologists. Each naming
company seems to build on a somewhat
different technique. One firm might use a
vast database of language bits that it scans
in a plodding fashion, creating names by
fusing distinct word parts. Another company
might make names through brainstorming
frenzies. Whatever the method, it is this
cadre of professionals who increasingly are
putting names to our digital world.
PowerBooking through
Lexicon is the patriarch of the nascent nam¬
ing bnsiness. President David Placek
worked his way up and out of advertising
proper to found the company in 1982, gam¬
bling on the need for such a niche. In 14
years, Lexicon has named more than 1,300
companies, products, and services. Over Lhe
years, the company's business has boomed
along with the rest of the industry. Last year
alone, with a staff of 15, Lexicon dished out
more than 130 names.
The walls of Placet's office are covered
start to think and act alike. “What we are
fighting here is a move toward common¬
ality and away from diversity and diver¬
gent thinking. Our clients are paying us to
think beyond where they thought ”
One of Lexicon's best jobs to date is the
PowerBook. in 1989, Apple had just intro¬
duced a heavy, ineffective portable machine
- a failure. The computer maker needed a
label for a new line. It hired Lexicon, which
began working with the terms laptop and
notebook and brought together focus groups
of users of competitive products. Then
came the serendipitous naming of Power-
Book. From a semantic perspective, the
company combined the word book , a small
product that holds a lot of information, with
power . “What you have in PowerBook” says
Placek, ‘ns two things that are very com¬
mon but arc not used together”
Together Lexicon's linguistic guru Bob
Cohen and Stanford University linguistics
professor Will Leben have researched the
effects of sound on the way brand names
are perceived. In PowerBook the p in power
brings to mind compactness and speed.
A typical project yields several thousand possible names,
but a client purchases only those it plans to use -
prices starting at $30,000 per name.
with sheets of white butcher paper marked
up from many brainstorming sessions, A
shelf is lined with 25 burgundy binders
packed with the results of his years of nam¬
ing. A typical project yields several thou¬
sand possible names that sometimes get
reused in other projects. A company pay¬
ing for names may browse the entire list
generated during its project but purchases
only those it plans to use - at prices start¬
ing at $30,000 per name.
Though creative techniques vary* all
involve tremendous consideration. At their
finest, namers improvise like jamming jazz
musicians to achieve a completely original
result But if you put a group in a room
together, Placek says, after a while they
while the b in hook suggests the perception
of dependability, and both concepts are
important underlying messages for the
product, says Cohen.
According to Lexicon’s standards, Power-
Book falls into one of five categories of
names - one that's “constructed " It consid¬
ers a name like Apple, a typical noun, to be
“real," whereas a word that does not exist,
tike Pentium,) is “invented" The last two
categories are “classical * such as Merm or
Athena , and “compressed " like Optima
{optimal without the f).
Regardless of the category, Lexicon
believes the ultimate test is whether a
name serves as nothing less than a “com¬
munications vessel" - or a name capable
06
of conveying layers of meaning. PowerBook
was just two sandwiched words until its
meaning was communicated through hun¬
dreds of advertising spots. In a word, it
was branded. The names Lexicon creates
are labels; clients create brands.
Morphing morphemes
If Lexicon mostly uses creativity to gener¬
ate its yearly crop of names, NameLab Inc.t
located across the bay in San Francisco,
uses a different approach: an almost scien¬
tific system of constructional linguistics.
NamcLab's database -driven words mith, Ira
Bachrach, calls what he does grunt work.
He doesn't consider the creative firms'
lattes and brainstorms productive.
NameLab fashions its names strictly
through tinkering with small word parts,
called morphemes. All English nouns,
verbs, and adjectives are composed of mor¬
phemes, the small semantic elements like
the van - which means fronts top, or lead¬
ing edge - in advantage or vanity. Before
Bachrach got to work, the largest dictio¬
nary of morphemes held just 1,400, orga¬
nized phonetically by the 40 sounds in the
English language. But he devised a nota-
tional system that expanded the definition
of a morpheme and upped the number of
usable word parts to 6,200.
Names hatched by NameLab, often neol¬
ogisms or newfangled expressions, are
stitched together by combining relevant
morphemes into words that gain meaning.
A consumer shopping for a sporty sedan,
for example, implicitly knows that the
morpheme am, which Bachrach used to
name Aeura, means precise or with care .
In 1983, the founders of a start-up com¬
puter company approached Bachrach look¬
ing for a name with three implied mes¬
sages: small, integral object, and computer.
Bachrach used the morphemes comp , mean¬
ing computer ; and pak , meaning small,
integral object . The k in pak was changed
to a q, because the company founder, Ben
Rosen, wanted the name to stand out in
the text of The Wall Street Journal. There
are no other proprietary names besides
Compaq with a terminal q.
WIRED JUNE 1997
Bachrach does not disguise his back¬
ground as a straight-shooting electrical
engineer But in the 1950s, he studied in a
linguistics PhD program at the University
of Rochester, New York, where he researched
morphemes with an IBM grant. That edu¬
cation paid off later in life. After retiring
from several other careers, Bachrach
founded NameLab in 1981. Be took the
company into a virtual sphere in 1995 and
now meets daily with his staff in an
intranet chat room to crunch morphemes.
The staff includes two anonymous linguis¬
tics professors, who surreptitiously work
around policies at their institutions to
snatch a piece of the Silicon Valley action.
AirTotichy-feely
In the industry, NameLab is looked upon
with a certain amount of disdain by others
who value an approach that gets namers
out into the world. That's particularly true
of San Francisco's Idiom, a firm that cham¬
pions elaborate outside engagement.
The Super Session, Idiom's signature
service, is an all-day creative event. Idiom
has just two principals, Rick Bragdon and
George Frazier, who spend weeks prepar¬
ing the agenda for each Super Session.
They summon freelance professionals from
various fields who can add diversity to the
often-insular naming industry. Depending
on the project, a Super Session might
include a poet, an investigative journalist,
or someone who styles food for still pho¬
tographs. At a well-choreographed meet¬
ing, the crew might yield upward of 1,800
names in one morning.
A Super Session is Med with what
Idiom calls game technology, like Synonym
Explosion. In naming a children's edutain¬
ment product that supposedly makes the
child's mind soar, the players go from the
words m ind and soar to others like Einstein,
sneakers , and rainbow , which are later
morphed by a computer program and mas¬
saged to yield names such as Mindstein ,
Mind Sneakers, and B rainbow.
Idiom involves clients directly in the
creative process, which brings some unex¬
pected results. During a break in one
Super Session, Bragdon and Frazier
watched a company's two top executives
engage in an impassioned round of Foos-
ball. The sight of two grown men smacking
around a Fooshali impressed them. “We
learned as much as anything about that
company by watching the two top guys
playing Foosball. This was a very active,
powerful, driven couple of guys," says Fra¬
zier. The company name that emerged
from this Super Session? Wallop.
Idiom's partners are as eclectic as their
approach. Frazier's background includes
stints as a cop, novelist, newspaper reporter,
and private investigator. Bragdon, who has
an MBA, worked in Pepsi's marketing
department and was president of a design
firm. As an avocation, Bragdon studies
Jungian archetypes, those ideas and beliefs
common to all humans and present in all
cultures. “In naming, even if the arche¬
types are not consciously understood, they
pack a lot of meaning,” he says.
In 1994, PadFel Corporation was a $1 bil¬
lion cellular company struggling to find its
own identity after being spun off from tele¬
com giant Pacific Telesis, Bragdon, leading
another naming group, was approached by
the company to figure out a new name. He
began running around the firm collaring
workers and went out on the street interro¬
gating cellular phone users. The company
stiffs spoke in the technological double¬
speak of engineers, what Bragdon calls
UniMobilTeleDigiConiLink babble. The
people on the street spoke about how their
lives were crazy and out of control.
“Our investigation proved that people
want cellular because it enables greater
personal freedom, control, and intercon¬
nection. They want to stay in touch," he
says. So Bragdon and company came up
with an archetypical word, one that was
touchy-feely but also very '90s high tech -
AirTouch .
The name crunch
So what’s in a name? It depends on the
decade. In the early days, when lumbering
computers like ENIAC (Electronic Numeri¬
cal Integrator and Computer) reigned
supreme, names were little more than
acronyms - impenetrable ones at that.
By the 1970s and 1980s, high tech names
seemed to have beamed down from an alien
planet. Names were full of f/s, xs , and zs.
Take Xerox, Xcalibur, Xidcx, Xomox, Xon-
ics, Xyrofin, and even Xonex, which was
sued in 1978 by Exxon for using an ana¬
gram of its name. These names often were
coined by engineers.
The '90s will be remembered for a batch
of titles with character and personality:
Ricochet, Yahoo!, Java, and Marimba,
among others. Though these names were
created without consultants, the pros
appreciate Lhal such names have shifted
the standards.
Names in the 1990s also need broad con¬
sumer appeal. In the 1970s, says Lexicon’s
Placek, Intel was far from creating a brand¬
ed microprocessor. By 1993, when Lexicon
created the name Pentium as a tern to evoke
a fifth-generation (pente) chip with reso¬
nance as an element (tike titanium), Intel
leveraged it into a big brand name.
If naming styles seem to have taken an
abrupt turn to the arbitrary, one reason lies
in the sheer volume of registered trade¬
marks - 750,000 at last count. After a cer¬
tain point, it grows hard to trademark
words that use what NameLab calls “tech-
noid nouns": like com , and data , and tech .
In 1996 alone, there was a grand total of
8,128 trademarked names that included the
morpheme com , 4,674 names with net ,
If naming styles seem to have taken an abrupt turn to
the arbitrary, one reason lies in the sheer volume of
registered trademarks - 750,000 at last count.
07
WIRED JUNE 1997
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A n th rof A nth ro Ca rt an d Tech n ologij Fu rr titu re a re regis tered trade m a rks of A n fh ro.
3,577 with power , and 1,073 with web7
according to Thomson & Thomson, a trade¬
mark database research firm. iClt is very
hard to make names memorable and inter¬
esting if they are of that structure. They
disappear into the noise ” says Bachrach.
Even if you avoid hackneyed word parts,
the sheer number of trademarked high
tech names is still crowding out the field.
The US Patent and Trademark Office
places trademarks in 42 classes. Most high
tech names fail into Class 9, defined as elec¬
trical and scientific apparatus trademarks.
That class now has some 282,000 pending,
registered, and abandoned trademarks;
compare that to the 016,500 word forms
listed in the entire unabridged edition of
the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary.
And even if a finely tuned naming
machine such as Lexicon can think of a
few thousand names, that’s only the first
step. It needs to get client approval, check
trademark availability, and figure out
whether the Internet domain name has
been snatched. These are issues that quickly
erode the numbers, a state of affairs that
inspires fear in the naming industry.
Faced with this daunting landscape, Lex¬
icon has spun off a new company, Riptide.
The first of its kind. Riptide ls a Bell Labs¬
like research wing that will try to create
cutting-edge naming techniques. The com¬
pany is small now, with just a few people
on staff, hul Lexicon intends to provide
enough money and freedom to inspire this
group to reinvent the name game.
Riptide’s office is several miles from Lex¬
icon, to give it some distance from the par¬
ent company's mind-set. Placek recalls
how the US Air Force’s stealth fighter was
invented by the isolated venture that was
Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works. Perhaps
the time has come for a naming Skunk
Works. i£We need to get to higher ground/’
Placek says. Riptide is an attempt, at least,
to promote divergent thinking as a way to
avoid drowning in a sea of names. ■ m m
Alex Franhel (acfrankel@compuserve.com)
is a San Francisco- based writer and occa¬
sional name consultant.
S;
I
9
I
I
i
f
■
*
I
I
3.
On the Web
On PointCast
On email
I
e
On your desktop.
I
I
it
i
|
j
Stay Con
not'tori fiat U/iraW
www. wired, com
ELECTRO SPHERE
Speak the Future
A glossary for the Age of Access.
By Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker
The 500-Year Delta, excerpted here , is
the work of former Yankelovich partners
Watts Wacker, now resident forecaster at
SRI Consulting , and Jim Taylor, director of
global marketing at Gateway 2000. Equal
parts deep demographic research and
divining rod r this wide-ranging guide to
u what happens after what comes next ”
spells out how conver¬
gence and accelerat¬
ing rates of change
ha ve redefined the
momentum of history. :
We ha ve entered an
era , in short ; when
chain reactions are
governed not by the
domino effect but by
Slinky theory, a con¬
tinuous expansion
and contraction of
social energies.
Yet the shifting land¬
scape of the future,
like the increasingly
competitive craft of futurism, demands
more than a keen sense of historical cycles .
In fact, an car for idiom - and a knack for
coining phrases - has become the currency
of modern-day imagineering, whether you
chase the hidden agendas of popular culture
in the patois of street punks or trace the floor
plan of the next civilization in the techno-
babble of Sand Hill Road , Looking backward,
the true legacy of Naisbitts Megatrends or
Toffler's Third Wave may turn out to be not
the worldviews but the words .
Mastering the new millennialist lexicon,
it seems, is a primary th rival skill; a phrase
on everyone's lips - think push - can quickly
become the proverbial butterfly's wings .
Js.Ofi/SOO-yeardelta/ 1
Spelling out "what hap¬
pens after what tomes
mitf The 5QQ-Year Delta
also demonstrates that
a keen ear for idiom -
and a knack for coining
phrases - has become
the currency of modern-
day imagineering.
Wanker's coinages already have seeped into
many neo tribes of the new economy worn
in (iwordrobesv from the backwaters of the
Web to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley.
But use these words wisely: giossofacilia
may be the quickest route to global pillory.
Age of Access The age we are already in,
in which connectivity drives toward the
access of everyone to everyone, everything
to everything, and everything to everyone.
The Age of Access impels new political and
economic structures based on access, not
scarcity. See connectivity.
Anthrolineage The resume of cultural
experience that allows one, in a time-com¬
pressed world, to immediately discover
identity with a short-term other.
Bionomics Literally, the merger of biologi¬
cal and economic theory. In its more figur¬
ative sense, the merger of the world of the
made and the world of the born. Bionom¬
ics will flourish as an academic discipline
because as the two worlds merge, economic
systems will assume the properties of bio¬
logical ones.
Blue-chip ejaculation The tendency of
very large companies when confronted
with massive amounts of change to ejacu¬
late a single-point answer in a very large
way. See truncated perspective.
Capital quarks The subatomic structure of
the elemental breeding matter of any busi¬
ness. Capital quarks come in four forms.
From The 500-Year Delta: What Happens
After What Comes Next, by Jim Taylor and
Walts Wacker Copyright © 1997 by Jim
Taylor and Watts Wacker. Reprinted by
permission of Harper Busin css. an imprint
of HarperCotlins Publishers Inc \
WIRED JUNE 1997
DO El
WATTS WACKEft AND UM TATLQR: DICK DUANE
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Unruly quarks produce excessive gover¬
nance, excessive streams of capital, or
excessive expectations on the part of the
capital market or supplier. Fluid quarks
are capital that immediately engages and
sustains progress. Venal quarks require the
recipient organization to become like the
capital source. Social quarks add social
magnificence to the basic philosophical
concept. See pagan capital.
Competitive uniphobia A fixation on com¬
petitive situations that by their very nature
are transitory. See truncated perspective.
Complicated simplicity Whafs needed to
survive and prosper in a chaos world in
which reason no longer applies, in which
you must focus on outcome, not process,
and in which you must be, not do, “At the
still point of the turning world _ there
the dance is,” T. S, Eliot wrote in Book I of
his Four Quartets . “But neither arrest nor
movement. And do not call it fixity*
Connectivity The result of the fusion of
computing and communications. First
posited by Nobel laureate Arno Penzias.
See Age of Access.
Convergence The blending of culture and
ideas into a single product.
Corporate communalism The tendency
of executives within any corporation to
group within their own think-sets, experi¬
ence-sets, and produet-sets. See truncated
perspective.
Cryptocentrism The tendency of media
communes, tribes, and other microcultures
to invent language that maintains in-group/
out-of-group distinctions. Technobabble,
gang “signing,” and graffiti “tagging” are
all examples of cryptocentrism.
Cultural schizophrenia The modem condi¬
tion born of a disconnection between atti¬
tudes and behaviors, between the world as
it is presented and the world as we intuit it
to be. Cultural schizophrenia occurs when¬
ever society begins to reinvent its vision of
how it will conduct affairs in the future.
Customer loyalty The new imperative of
marketing. As the marketplace approaches
a supersaturation of products - as the power
in the marketing equation shifts from prod¬
uct to consumer - brand loyalty disappears.
To survive, manufacturers and retailers
will have to create unique loyalty relation¬
ships with their customers, one customer
at a time. See marketing surplus.
Disharmonious conjunctions The organiz¬
ing principle of a chaos world. Nothing can
be planned. Nothing happens as part of a
Cryptocentrism The tendency of microcultures to invent
language that maintains in-group/out-of-group distinctions.
Bruit Robtrtson, Director of Information Technology ami Rodney Rogers, Vice President of Operations, Fiends Cry stats.
i L I C T H
SPHERE
predictable chain of events* Decision mak¬
ing is driven by random convergences.
See oxymoronic future.
Distention Not inattention, but the refusal
to involve oneself in issues that have no
relevance over one’s life* A necessary sur-
vival skill in a chaos-driven world.
Diversify IQ A basic measure of the capacity
to survive and prosper in the Age of Access.
Diversity IQ is built on the ability to move
freely and tolerantly among people of various
races, cultures, backgrounds, and beliefs*
Downward nobility The decline in the
value of formerly status-laden items and
the simultaneous growth in the status value
of just being satisfied. Self-affrrmation will
come by underspending incomes and exer¬
cising independence as consumers, not by
depending upon objects to establish worth*
Ecomagnetks The creeping tendency of all
products to move toward the central values
in the culture,
Endotrufhs Truths known inside, but not
outside a culture - whether it!s a social, polit¬
ical, or economic organization, a tribe, or a
media commune. Endotruths usually begin
with the nature of the foun der of the organi¬
zation, and they explain why two companies
in the same business often have startlingly
different corporate cultures. See exotruths*
Evilution The transformation of evil from
time to time and place to place and at dif¬
fering rates of evolution, largely as deter¬
mined by tribes and communes. For the
Mother Jones media commune, Richard
Nixon remains the embodiment of evil
more than two decades after he resigned
the presidency under the threat of impeach¬
ment. For the Republican cocktail-party
circuit, Nixon has passed from victim to
embarrassment to redemption to radiant
political authority. See global pillory and
media communafism.
Exotruths Presumed truths about a culture,
whether they are in fact true or false. Exo¬
truths are the myths that frame the social
understanding of an organization. They
determine its external value and cannot be
disproved even by denying them. The exo-
truth of Coca-Cola is that the formula for
Coke is kept in a safe deep in corporate
headquarters; the endotruth (see above) is
that virtually everybody who is anybody at
Coca-Cola knows the formula by heart.
Fault tolerance The capacity of any organi¬
zation to tolerate calamitous events. Fault
tolerance increases in direct relation to
an organization's ability to say “thank you”
and “Tm sorry”
Filocity A capacity to come up to speed in
alien cultures, to make cultural penetra¬
tion and establish friendships* What Ferris
Dueller had in such abundance in the movie
named for him.
Flight impulse The tendency of everyone
between the ages of 45 and 50 to seek a
completely different lifestyle and actively
plot their escape*
Fraternities of strangers Ad hoc affinity
groups created for finite periods to achieve
specific ends. The new basis for social
organization. See tribal marketing.
At Florida Crystals, the sugar isn’t always refined. But the operation is.
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business initiatives on several fronts. SAP has also
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Futopia Statements or ideas about how to
live in the future that fail to make reference
to or take into account the impending urban
population explosion, AH speculations about
the future that do not factor in large urban
crowds are futopic and, thus, futile.
Global pillory Thanks to global access,
global connectivity, and global media sat¬
uration, global pillory is where you go when
you are globally bad. Nearly a decade after
he was brought low by the law and despite
extensive efforts to raise money for research
into prostate cancer, which he suffers
from, Michael Milken remains in global
pillory, both famous and ostracized.
Glossofacilia A tendency to use very large
words to explain very small phenomena,
Glossofacilia drives to complexify rather
than simplify and is the natural instinct
of reactionaries to an age of change.
Herd crimes Crimes that, once committed,
are repeated communally, by everyone hi Lhe
herd. Shoplifting is a herd crime of young
teenagers; smoking marijuana was the herd
crime of the counterculture of the late '60s
and early ’70s; padding expense accounts
is the herd crime of junior executives.
Homophyly The tendency of objects, when
in close proximity, to assume the character¬
istics of each other. Based on genetic theory,
homophyly is equally applicable to human
behavior. It increases in direct relation to
the increase in access and connectivity.
MTV, for example, has created a global
homophyly of musical tastes among young
people, just as television, in general, and
VCRs have created a global homophyly in
wants and desires. The ultimate extension
of homophyly is a global biological similar¬
ity that will threaten genetic variation.
Inconspicuous consumption Defining sim¬
ply your taste, not your life, by the items
you consume. Part of the new economics
built around individualism, not consumer¬
ism. See downward nobility.
Instant history Reinventions of history as
a way of accounting for near-term behavior.
The marketing of golfer Tiger Woods as a
racial icon and Microsoft's introduction of
Windows 95 were both examples of instant
history at work, but no example better cap¬
tures the spirit of instant history than the
annual NFL Super Bowl. As ex-running back
Duane Thomas once put it, “If it's so super,
how come they're having one next year?"
Intelligent disobedience What seeing-eye
dogs are taught - essentially that they are
to obey unless they have a better idea.
Intelligent disobedience is already embed¬
ded in tbe corporate culture of companies
like Microsoft. See unrules.
Latent personalization The unrealized
capacity of a product or an idea to be taken
personally. Clothing remains the highest
per capita commodity expenditure among
highly personalized products, but most
products, from books to tractors, have a
vast potential to be personalized. And in a
world of splintering markets arid individual
realities, realizing latent personalization
will become increasingly crucial to market
success.
Loss followers Substantive investment in
products, without a prospect of recovering
the investment, in order to catch up. The
extraordinary concession granted by the
state of Alabama to attract a new Mercedes
plant, the extraordinary expenditures
undertaken by the city of Baltimore to
attract the Cleveland Browns football team
- rechristened the Baltimore Ravens - and
Panasonic's heavy investment in a knockoff
of The Sony Walkman are all examples of
loss followers. In each case, the outlays
were necessary to remain credible: as a
state to relocate to, a city to invest in, an
electronic product to consider purchasing.
Macronomia The tendency of large organiza¬
tions to experience feelings of normlessness
and disgust with their own size. Macronomia
drives corporations like IBM to partition
their parts and decentralize their struc¬
tures. The cell ul arity and decentralization,
in turn, threaten value continuity in the
whole. See values-based management.
Marketing surplus A theory developed by
McKinseys David Court, which holds that
success is determined not by market share,
bu t by which one of the entities in any
transaction - from raw-goods supplier
through manufacturer, retailer, and con¬
sumer - holds The greatest amount of the
surplus or profit made at each step of the
process. As the market reaches saturation,
marketing surplus moves to the consumer.
Media communalism Au affinity group in
which members selectively manipulate
their media lives to reinforce a singular
worldview or set of values. See truncated
perspective.
Mediocracy The hierarchy formed within
microcultures on the basis of media appre¬
ciation for the individuals that make up
the micro culture. New York's Reverend
A1 Sharpton, to cite one example, has no
political base, but has been anointed by
the media as the mediocrat for his micro-
culture. Because mcdiocrats tend To know
one another, they are how microcultures
communicate with one another.
Mental flexibility The measure of a society's
ability to accept change, and perhaps the
largest single determinant of national macro-
wealth in the future. A 1995 World Bank
ranking of future economic potential, based
in part on mental flexibility, placed Australia
first in the world and the United States fifth.
Multiple yous The capacity to re-create
yourself as the situation demands. John
Wayne, strong and silent whether he played
a cowboy or a soldier, was the paradigm of
a loyalty- based world. Torn Hanks shifting
h orn idiot-savant (Forrest Gump) to AIDS vic¬
tim (Philadelphia) to hero (Apollo 13) is the
personality paradigm of a deal-based world.
Na nostalgia The tendency to feel nostalgic
over events, such as movies, that concluded
Macronomia The tendency of large organizations
to experience feelings of normlessness
and disgust with their own size.
WIRED JUNE 1997
OOQ
only seconds ago. The $150-a- bottle Krug
champagne, for example, celebrates in its
advertisements its capacity to deliver nano-
stalgic moments. Instant history (see above)
takes advantage of nanostalgia by provid¬
ing the throttle for such moments. Super
Bowl replays are n a nostalgic moments in
the midst of an instant-history happening.
Non-sense 1. What logic becomes as we
cross the delta from reason to chaos, 2.
The indefinable qualities of great brands
that enable them to travel across and
through time,
Nulture The convergence of nerds and cul¬
ture, and a powerful, growing force as a
majority of the population actively seeks to
assimilate and apply advanced technology*
On the bubble As commonly used, a term
of great respect As it should be used, a term
of great fear To be “on the bubble” is to be
so close to a trend that your future success
is in imminent jeopardy. Why? Because
trends move in ever more narrow bands,
and the success you presently enjoy is likely
to blind you to the changes you must
embrace to succeed in the future. When
the capital it delivers is never pagan. See
values-based management.
Particle economics The economic analog
of particle physics, which concerns itself
with matter so small that it lacks magni¬
tude yet still exerts attraction and has iner¬
tia. A central discipline as capital becomes
ever more frictionless, ownership disap¬
pears as a measure of wealth, and money
comes to lack intrinsic meaning.
Permanent flexibility What ail great com¬
panies and managers will have - the capacity
to constantly remake themselves as different
and randomly arising situations demand.
Privacy management Critical in the Age
of Access and one of the next great growth
sectors. As connectivity spreads, privacy
management will become the ultimate
status tool,
Beal disguise Getting outside the box,
adopting a disguise that allows you both to
be yourself and to experience life or a situa¬
tion from a different perspective. The stan¬
dard work in the field remains John Howard
Griffin's Black Like Me. See diversity IQ.
Shelf determinism The capacity of products
Permanent flexibility The capacity of great companies
and managers to constantly remake themselves
as different and randomly arising situations demand.
you’re on the bubble, it's time to blow your
organization up.
Oxy moronic future A future formed by
the infinite repetition of disharmonious
conjunctions (see above).
Pagan capital Capital produced and deliv¬
ered to a company with one set of values
from a capital source with a different set
of values. Whether in the form of direct
investments or venture capital, pagan capi¬
tal produces often huge dislocations in
entrepreneurial companies, because the
values that govern the capital are not com¬
mensurate with the values that created the
success of the recipient organization. The
great success of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire
Hathaway is directly related to the fact that
to transform themselves on the shelf with¬
out any physical changes - a characteristic
of all great global brands. Tide, to cite one
example, takes on different meanings for
differing cultures, but however the culture
defines Mean,” Tide is its standard of
excellence.
Sisbertizing Named for the movie critics
Siskel and Ebert, this is the process by
which products and ideas are validated
within particular microcultures by objec¬
tive social critics anointed by the micro¬
culture to do so. Every microculture has
its Sisberts, and it is crucial to appeal to
them because, while advertising can create
arousal among the microculture, only sis-
bertizing can create conviction.
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^SPHERE
Situal intimacy Intimacy based on proxim¬
ity, not deep association. The annual Bohe¬
mian Grove gathering in California - an
exercise in shared nudity among the rich
and powerful - is an example of the creation
of situal intimacy, as is the US Marine Corps
boot camp at Parris island, South Carolina.
Arthur Andersen institutionalized situal
intimacy among its trainees by giving them
free tickets and encouraging them to get
drunk with each other Situai intimacy can
lead to situational love (see below).
Situational lifestyles Deal-based, not loy¬
alty-based lifestyles.
Situational love Spasms of affection driven
by circumstances that have no binding
effect beyond the moment. The intensity of
situational love grows in direct proportion
to onr incapacity to spend emotional capi¬
tal in the course of our ordinary lives, and
as the compression of time intersects with
the acceleration of stress, the incapacity
to spend such capital in the normal course
of events grows exponentially. See situal
intimacy.
Slinky theory A theory of social history
Truncated equilibrium The theory that evo¬
lution occurs not as a succession of regularly
repeated peaks and valleys, but in huge for¬
ward leaps followed by long plateaus. We
are currently in the midst of one such leap.
Truncated perspective What happens
either individually or within corporations
when communalisni artificially limits the
ability to see things whole,
Un rules A form of corporate discipline
built on the premise that in a chaos world
the company with the fewest rules wins.
Value stacking How generational values
are transmitted. Each generation inherits
a stack of values from its predecessors,
and each value is subtly transformed as it
is stacked and passed on. Value stacking is
influenced by the acceleration in the rate
of generational change.
Values-based management Management
based not on objectives, but on a finite
number of incontrovertible beliefs never
subject to a proof test. In a chaos-based
world in which objectives are constantly
overwhelmed by variables, values-based
management assures that decisions ulti¬
Unrules A form of corporate discipline built on
the premise that in a chaos world
the company with the fewest rules wins.
based on the premise that at any given
moment society, like a Slinky toy, is either
contracting toward consensus or expand¬
ing toward the exploration of end points.
Thrival skills Skills that will allow individ¬
uals and businesses to not just survive but
to thrive in the Age of Possibility.
Tribal marketing The creation of affinity
groups for commercial ends. Perhaps the
most notable and successful contemporary
example is Harley-Davidson, which has
coupled the sale of motorcycles and peri¬
pherals to the creation of weekend motor¬
cycle chibs and an entire way of life built
around Harley-Davidson products. Tribal
marketing works best when it is constantly
reinforced with icons.
mately arrange themselves to serve the
good of the whole.
Vectron An idea or product that pushes
a company in a short-wave, relatively
insignificant direction, yet is critical to
the company’s ability to operate on the
bleeding fringe.
Wrebets Employees who stray from the
inherent values of an organization and
thus seek to wreck its value system. If
wrebels are important enough, they are
sent to global pillory (see above).
Xerophilia Not from the Greek root xeroy
meaning “dry,w but from the company that
turned its dry-copying procedure into a
global trademark. The love of copying, and
the ability of everything to be copied, m m m
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In Vitro Veritas
"It is modernity which has
caused everyday life to degen¬
erate into 'the everyday/"
- Michel Trebitsch
By Nathan Myhrvold
If you can clone a sheep, you can almost certainly done a human
being. Some of the most powerful people in the world have felt com¬
pelled to act against this threat: cloning humans is taken to be either
a fundamentally evil thing that must be stopped or, at the very least,
a complex ethical issue that needs legislation and regulation. But
what, exactly, is so bad about it?
If humans have a right to reproduce, what right does society have
to limit the means? Essentially all reproduction is done these days
with medical help - at delivery, and often before.
With in vitro fertilization, the sperm and egg Pushing FOTWard, Falling Back
By Andrew L. Shapiro
"Is it possible," asked Justice
Antonin Scalia during the
Supreme Court's March 19
review of the Communications
Decency Act, "that this statute
Peripheral Vision
Provocation
In a chaos world, it is only by oper¬
ating at the edge of the extremes
- by courting provocation - that
managers can break free of trun¬
cated perspective. (See "Speak the
Future," page 1 00.)
From The S 00- Year Delta, by Watts Wacker and
Jim Taylor. Copyright © 1997 by Watts Wacker
and Jim Taylor, Reprinted by permission of
HarperBusiness, an imprint of HarperCollIns
Publishers Inc.
are combined in the lab and surgically implanted
In the womb. The cloning procedure Is similar
to IVEThe only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would
be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What Jaw or principle - secu¬
lar, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic
material in a flask is OK, but another is not?
Clones already exist. About one in every 1,000 births results in
a pair of babies with the same DNA. We know them as identical twins.
Scientific studies on such twins - reared together or apart - show
that they share many characteristics. Just how many they share is
a contentious topic in human biology. But genetic determinism is
largely irrelevant to the cloning issue. Despite how many or how few
individual characteristics twins - or other clones -
have in common, they are different people in the
most fundamental sense. They have their own iden¬
tities, their own thoughts, and their own rights.
A person's basic humanity is not governed by how
he or she came into this world, or whether some¬
body else happens to have the same DNA.
Fear of clones is just another form of racism.
We all agree it is wrong to discriminate against
people based on a set of genetic characteristics
known as "race." Calls for a ban on cloning amount
to discrimination against people based on another
genetic trait - the fact that somebody already has
an identical DNA sequence. The most extreme
form of discrimination is genocide - seeking to
eliminate that which is different. In this case, the
genocide is preemptive - clones are so scary that
we must eliminate them before they exist with
a ban on their creation.
The most upsetting possibility in human cloning
isn't superwarriors or dictators. It's that rich people
with big egos will clone themselves. The common
practice of giving a boy the same name as his father
or choosing a family name for a child of either sex
reflects our hunger for vicarious immortality. Clones
may resonate with this instinct and cause some people to reproduce
this way. So what? Rich and egotistic folks do all sorts of annoying
things, and the law is hardly the means with which to try to stop them.
The "deep ethical issues" about cloning mainly boil down to
is unconstitutional today ...
but will be constitutional next
week.... Or next year or in
two years?"
Scalia may have been think¬
ing of the rise of push media,
which could indeed undermine
the claim that online censor¬
ship is unconstitutional. Pre¬
cedent holds that indecency
can be restricted in media that
are pervasive and intrusive:
"indecent material presented
over the airwaves confronts
the citizen," the Court said in
Pacifica, the 1 978 "seven dirty
words" case.
Meanwhile, CDA plaintiffs
have relied heavily on char¬
acterizing the Net as a pull
medium. So did the lower
court that struck down the
law, stating, "Communications
over the Internet do not
'invade' an individual's home
or appear on one's computer
screen unbidden." Not yet.
But the day when the Internet
is as intrusive as TV or radio
may not be not far off. Have
push media's marketing-savvy
boosters thought about its
consequences for free speech?
Andrew L. Shapiro (ashapiro@interport
.net) is a Feffow at The Twentieth Cen¬
tury Fund and a contributing editor at
The Nation.
non
WIRED JUNE 1997
J D M £ 5 r O ii 7 * i
Practically all the major tech¬
nological changes since the
beginning of industrialization
have resulted in unforeseen
consequences ... Our very
power over nature threatens
to become itself a source of
power that is out of control ...
Choices are posed that are
too large, too complex, too
important and comprehensive
to be safely left to fallible
human beings,"
- Herman Kahn and
Anthony Wiener
Memes
jealousy. Economic jealousy is bad enough, and it is a factor here, but
the thing that truly drives people crazy is sexual jealousy. Eons of
evolution through sexual selection have made the average man or
woman insanely jealous of any interloper who gains a reproductive
advantage - say, by diddling your spouse. Cloning Is less personal than
cuckoldry, but it strikes a similar chord: someone has got
the reproductive edge on you.
To some, the scientist laboring away to unlock the mys
teries of life is a source of evil, never to be trusted. To
others, including me, the scientist is the ray of light, illu¬
minating the processes that make the
universe work and making us better
through that knowledge. Various argu¬
ments can be advanced toward either
view, but one key statistic is squarely on my side. The vast
majority of people, including those who rail against science,
owe their very lives to previous medical discoveries. They
embody the fruits of science. Don't let the forces of dark¬
ness, ignorance, and fear turn us back from research.
Instead, let us raise - and yes, even clone - new generations
of hapless ingrates, who can whine and rail against the
discoveries of the next age.
Make Them Pay
By Douglas Barnes
Nathan Myhrvold is chief technology officer at Microsoft; the full genetic material
from which this piece was reproduced can he found at wwwjiate.com/CriticalMass
/97-03-1 S/Critical Mass. asp. Reprinted with permission. Slate is a trademark of
Microsoft Corporation . Copyright 1997. All rights reserved .
The Creative Spark
By Liane M. Gabora
Memes, unlike genes, do not come packaged with instruc¬
tions for their replication; they rely on the pattern-evolv¬
ing machinery of our brains. We tend to replicate memes
that satisfy needs - biological needs like food, shelter, and
sex, or needs that contribute less directly to survival of
self and progeny. These include the need for love, and the
need for a coherent internal model of the world, something
we can call upon whenever a situation is too complicated
for our hardwired instincts.
This worldview weaves each new instant of experience
into its tapestry of associations. Mental censors, however,
can disrupt the assimilation of memes that threaten the
individual's ego or belief structure. This prevents the
brain from forging associations between the new meme and pre¬
viously stored memes. Conversely, insightful memes sometimes
trigger a chain reaction that modifies their host's entire worldview
- a conceptual phase shift. Since brains are wired so that related
memes trigger one another domino-style, cultural evolution, like
biological evolution, has built-in momentum. We control the birth
of "our" memes only to the extent that we provide a fertile ground
for them to grow and multiply.
The brain's tendency to play with its memes, continually reorganiz¬
ing and ironing out arbitrary associations to forge more meaningful
For years it's been possible
to construct electronic pay¬
ment systems that are orders
of magnitude less vulnerable
than
checks
or credit
cards.
Yet MasterCard and Visa
get cooperation at the high¬
est levels for systems that
are only slightly more secure
than leaving money lying on
the street They resist new
technology because the cost
to them is greater than what
they lose in fraud.
Taxpayers, however, get
to bankroll all the arresting,
prosecuting, and imprisoning
~ an amazing subsidy for
crime essentially created by
sloppy protocols. So do we
decriminalize payment sys¬
tem abuse? Send AmEx and
the others a bill each month?
One thing's for sure: as long
as the government provides
for free what would be unnec¬
essary if companies used
better technology, we'll keep
getting systems prone to
fraud. And well all be paying
to lock people up on the com¬
panies' behalf
Douglas Barnes, vice president ofCINet,
dissects deficient digital commerce as
ci work-related hobby.
"Superstition Is the reservoir
of all truths."
- Charles Baudelaire
WIRED JUNE
19 9 7
□ id
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ON THE NEW
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The Nationwide Broadcast
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nels broadcast directly on their home PCs. They
can tune into WaveTop programming with a simple
click, just like using a TV remote control. And since
WaveTop will be broadcast nationally via data
embedded into every PBS TV signal, there’ll be no
Internet bottlenecks or tying up of telephone lines.
Users can choose news, sports, weather,
kids shows, music, games, the latest software
and lots more in real time or conveniently save
it for future viewing. And the software and ser¬
vice is free to the consumer. The Yankee Group
called this new concept in home delivery, "The
Ultimate Push Technology.”
Using WaveTop is As Easy
As Changing Channels
On A Remote Control.
Content providers and software publishers can
establish and name their own channels on The
WaveTop Network. Channels that can be creat¬
ed with their own look and feel. Leading OEMs
will bundle WaveTop into their latest hardware.
And advertisers will have a variety of ways on
this new medium to reach the potential mil¬
lions of consumers receiving WaveTop.
Reaching the home PC market has never
been this easy.
To become a partner and take advantage
of this essential and competitive service, call
602-952-5500 and ask for WaveTop.
And don’t miss the exciting demo on
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WavePhore, Im, (NASDAQ; WAVO)
J £>
r tJ ;i T
"Organizations are like fish
with people as their cells.
They evolved to thrive in the
ocean, the high-viscosiiy
world of the industrial age.
These fish must now change
into fowl to thrive in the
zero-viscosity world of the
information age. Most of
them won't make it Evolu¬
tion doesn't work that way.*
- Brad Cox
"Sound commercialism is the
best test of true value in art.
People work hard for their
money and if they won't part
with it for your product the
chances are that your product
hasn't sufficient value....
Genius doesn't starve.*
- fterfon Braley
The Gates of Heaven
By Bill Brazell
ones, often creates unanticipated solutions to pressing problems.
This suggests that creativity, the fountainhead of cultural variation,
is strategic - not random, as are the variation-generating processes
in biology.
Another consequence of meme-play is that knowledge
or emotion encoded in one kind of experience can be
translated into another kind of experience. The tension
produced by censored sexual material, for example, might
be diffused in a joke. Or a musician may come to habitually
funnel memes encountered in all types of situations -
particularly censored material - through brain modules
that filter out domain-dependent elements and adapt the
core components to the constraints of music. It is in this
repackaged format that memes
are more fully integrated into
their host's memory, and it is
through this process that the
creator establishes a sense of control over memes that were
previously off-limits. Creativity is thus directly or Indirectly
derived from experience in the world, and since the
mathematics underlying this world - the set of all natural
functions - is a small subset of all possible functions, the
constraints that guide creation are not arbitrary. The drum¬
beat of a song might echo a heartbeat, and when rhythm
and chord progression suggest the sound of someone
sobbing, we feel sad.
Memes, as advertisers are well aware, can fool potential
hosts into believing they are needed by associating with
memes we already identify as necessary. It takes time to
degrade these unwarranted associations and assimilate
memes that were previously censored - in other words,
to mend flaws in the fabric of the individual's worldview.
Thus the power of meditative practices: release from the
isolating restriction of censors creates a feeling of one¬
ness. Transcending the ego can be taken to mean getting
in touch with that part of ourselves that existed before
our minds were colonized by memes, often visualized as
a spark, halo, or sphere of light.
If each field of knowledge is a pile of sand, the overlap¬
ping sandpiles of our era have begun to fuse into one big
block. Perhaps the 21st century will see the entire slab of
human knowledge stood on its side, and with the help of
a new breed of sciences that are not just interdisciplinary
but transdisciplinary , we will carve slices that run perpen¬
dicular to all the traditionally defined disciplines, encom¬
passing part of each. Memetks appears not only to put us
on the road to understanding the pervasiveness, diversity,
and adaptive complexity of the cultural debris that sur¬
rounds and infests us. It also yields unexpected insight into creativity
and spiritual matters that have mystified us since the first fledgling
memes appeared in our ancestors' brains.
When Dan Rather reported in
1 986 that he had been beaten
by attackers shouting "Ken¬
neth, what's the frequency?"
rumors circulated that the
assailants had been hired
because of the "frequency"
with which Rather was alleg¬
edly satisfying a television
executive's
wife.
The word,
however,
apparently referred to mega¬
hertz. William Tager, already
serving time for killing an NBC
studio hand, recently admit¬
ted that he assaulted Rather
to learn what frequency the
media were using to broad¬
cast into his brain.
The mentally ill have always
differed from the rest of
humanity only by degree - an
unsound mind will translate
societal fear into a persona!
fantasy. So while religious
delusions are still widespread
in other parts of the world,
technologic fantasies now far
outpace them in the United
States, says psychiatrist Chris¬
topher Linskey.
"As American society
becomes more technological,
our delusions will follow,"
Linskey says. "Paranoia and
grandiosity will remain con¬
stant despite cultural changes,
but the content will change."
Courage.
BUI Brazell tunes in as a copy editor
at LAN Times.
Uane M- Cabo ra (liane@cs.ucla.eduL a research fellow at UCLA's Center for the Study Of the
Evolution and Origin of Life, serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Memetics fwww
.fmb.mmu.ac.uk/jom-ern it/). She is working toward putting together an animation/artificial
fife/motion capture/dance laboratory far applied research Into the oldest form ofmemetic
exchange: body language ;
WIRED JUNE 1997
Standard and Profession^ ]
Visual HcEercnce
to
Sa
Edited by James Daly
Dear Rpple,
In the movie Independence Day , a PowerBook
saves the earth from destruction. Now it's time
to return the favor. Unfortunately, even devoted
Mac addicts must admit that you look a little
beleaguered these days: a confusing product
line, little inspiration from the top, software
developers fleeing.
But who wants to live in a world without you?
Not us. So we surveyed a cross section of hard*
core Mac fans and came up with 1 01 ways to
get you back on the path to salvation. We chose
not to resort to time travel or regurgitate the
same old shoulda/coulda/wouldas (you shoulda
licensed your OS in 1 987, for instance, or coulda
upped your price/performance in 1993).
LUe don’t belieue Apple is
rotten to the core, Chrysler nearly
went under in the late 1 970s and came back to
lead its industry. Here's a fresh assessment of
what can be done to fix your once-great com¬
pany using the material at hand. Don't wait for
a miracle. You have the power to save the world
-and yourself.
www.wired.com/ 5.06/a p pie/
1. Admit it. You're out of the hardware game.
Outsource your hardware production, or scrap it entirely
to compete more directly with Microsoft without the
liability of manufacturing boxes.
2. License the Apple name/technology to appliance
manufacturers and build GUIs for every possible device
- from washing machines to telephones to WebTV, Have
them all use the same communications protocol. Result:
you monopolize the market for smart devices/homes.
3. Start pampering independent software vendors.
Your future depends on strong, user-friendly software.
ISVs are losing confidence and crossing over to the
Dark Side to take advantage of Winters market share.
Remember what happened to OS/2 - not enough applh
cations, updates too late, scarce industry support. And
all the marketing dollars IBM threw at it couldn't help.^
WIRED JUNE 1997
DIB
Technologists get so
caught up in the bits
and bytes that they
r forget why people use
computers at all. Apple has been
a victim of the success of the Mac¬
intosh. It made an overcommitment
to across-the-board backward com¬
patibility and is suffering from a
severe lack of vision. Success has
blinded management to more radi¬
cal alternatives. It never rethinks
the whole proposition. Throw out
the old and clumsy desktop, along
with its operating-system-and-appli-
cations paradigm, and go for true
task-centered design. Hanging on
to the decades-old "look and feel"
will keep the old customer base
while sacrificing the future. The new
software should be platform-inde¬
pendent, making Apple primarily
a software supplier and giving the
world a superior alternative to Micro¬
soft's Windows.
Jef Raskin, creator of the Mac
Drop that wimpy
} ad campaign with
its effete typeface.
rCome out slugging
with hard-nosed product compar¬
isons. Possible ad lines:
“Pentium - for the rest of them."
"The fastest laptop in the world!"
"I'm in a great big hurry. Give me
the Mac"
Roger Ebert, film critic
4. Gil Amelio should steal a page
from Lee lacocca's book - work
for one year without a salary, just
to inspire the troops.
5. Straighten out the naming
convention. Link model numbers
to processor speed. When buying
a 3400 laptop computer, what,
exactly, are you getting? Unless you
study the brochures, you don't know
how it compares with its competi¬
tion. On the other hand, Wintel talks
explicitly about processor speed.
It's a Pentium 200-MHz box.
6. Apologize. You've let down many
devoted users and did not deliver
on the promise of the Macintosh
platform.
7. Don't disappear from the retail
chains. Rent space in a computer
store, flood it with Apple products
(especially software), staff it with
Apple salespeople, and display every¬
thing like you're a living, breathing
company and not a remote, dusty
concept.
8. Buy a song. Last year, it would
have been "Respect" by Aretha
Franklin.This year, maybe it's "Ain't
too Proud to Beg*"
9. Fire the people who forecast
product demand. In 1996, you had
a million dollars in back orders for
the PowerBook 1400, while the ware¬
houses were full of unsold Perform as.
TO. Get a great Image campaign*
Let's get some branding (or rebrand¬
ing) going on. Reproduce the "1984"
spot with a 1 997 accent.
i Wired:
While working as programmers at
Atari, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs
create a blueprint for an easy-to-use
personal computer. They offer the
idea to their boss, founder Nolan
BushnelL
Wozniak and
Jobs finish work
on the Apple I - a
preassembled computer circuit board
that has no keyboard, case, sound,
or graphics - and launch
Computer
'J. Tired:
Bushneil turns them down.
“ No one notices
1 1 . Instead of trying to protect
your multicolored ass all the
time, try looking forward. You've
gotten stale by adopting the worst
aspects of your competitor's busi¬
ness practices.
12. Build a fire under your ad
agency. People don't need warm,
fuzzy infomercials about the Mac
family. And who cares what's on Todd
Rundgren's PowerBook? People want
to know about power (the CPU kind,
not George Clinton's), performance,
and price.
13. Exploit every Wintel user's
secret fear that some day they're
going to be thrown into a black
screen with a blanking C-prompt
Advertise the fact that Mac users
never have to rewrite autoexec.bat
or sys.ini files,
14. Do something creative with
the design of the box and sepa¬
rate yourselves from the pack*
The original Macs stood out because
of their innovative look. Repeat that
Get the folks at Porsche to design
a box. Or Giorgio Giugiaro. Or
Philippe Starck.We'd alt feel better
about shelling out the bucks for
a Power Mac 9600 if we could get
a tower with leopard spots.
IS* Dump (or outsource) the
Newton, eMate, digital cameras,
and scanners.
T 6* Take better care of your
customers* You need every one.
Make customer service a point
of pride. Many Mac users feel
alienated and have jumped ship.
1 7. Build some decent applica¬
tions that the business community
will care about.
1 8. Stop being buttoned-down
corporate and appeal to the fanatic
feeling that still exists for the Mac.
Power Computing's "HI give up my
Mac when they pry it from my stiff,
dying fingers" campaign hits the
right note. In the tech world, it's
still a crusade. Support the Mac
community, and the Mac commu¬
nity will support you,
1 9. Get rid of the cables.
Go wireless.
20* Tap the move toward push
media by creating a network com¬
puter with state-of-the-art technolo¬
gies, e.g„ videogame support for
Nintendo 64, top-notch graphics
such as QuickDraw 3D, and the
best possible bandwidth.
21* Sell yourself to IBM or
Motorola, the PowerPC makers.
You can become the computer
division that Motorola wants or
the alternative within IBM. This
would give the company volume
for its PowerPC devices and lever¬
age for other PowerPC offerings.
22* Create a new kids' computer,
an upgradable Wintel-compatible
machine, in bright rugged colors
that can take stickers and duct
tape, and that a young user can
call his/her own. This machine has
two killer apps: autograding of
homework for the teachers; passing
notes via wireless for the kids.
Price: US$350 before upgrades.
The Apple (I is intro¬
duced at the first West
Coast Computer Fa ire
It is the first personal
computer to generate
color graphics and includes a
built-in keyboard and power supply.
"S' The media pays more attention
to other, earlier PC makers, such as Kay pro
and Osborne*
Apple Disk II - an Inexpensive,
user-friendly, and fast floppy drive
debuts, making possible the devel¬
opment of serious software.
Hardly anyone makes
applications for It
WIRED JUNE 1997
Qi □
IMAGE: R. MAGEDQDN, £Sq.. APPLt COMPUTER PHOTOS' COURTESY A F PJ. E COWmER IftIC,
23* Create a new logo* The corpo¬
rate graphic of the multicolored
apple was tired in the 1 980s, now
it's positively obsolete. Piaster the
new logo on hats and T-shirts to be
worn conspicuously by Andre Agassi,
Nicolas Cage, and Ashley Judd.
24, Pay cartoonist Scott Adams
$10 million to have Difbert fall in
love with a Perform a repair woman,
25, Portables, portables, porta¬
bles* Pick the best-of-breed Wintel
in each of the portable categories
and then better it Wintel has a fan¬
tastic range.
26* If you sell it, make it! Stop
releasing new products if you can't
fulfill the orders. Angering the few
loyal customers you still have is
no way to do business.
27* Relocate the company to
Bangalore and make it cheap, cheap,
cheap. (See Wired 4.02, page 1 1 0.)
28. Don't lose your sense of
humor* Build a very large life pre¬
server and display it in front of your
Cupertino, California, headquarters.
29. Work closely with Hewlett-
Packard, Casio, or someone who
understands power management
When was the last time anyone
got more than 60 minutes out of
a PowerBook battery?
30. Reach forward by reaching
back. Secure the hearts and wallets
of college students through a high¬
ly targeted Apple Loan program.
Apple should:
1 . Merge with
Nintendo - this moves
the brand into the con¬
sumer space and under one man¬
agement team.
2. Buy Gateway - out with the cow
spots and in with the Apple logo.
3. License Windows 95 and NT -
keep the guts of the OS and work
exclusively on making the Windows
GUI just like the Mac.
Ann Winbiad, principal at Hummer
Winblad Venture Partners
Company's first printer,
the Silentypejs introduced.
Jobs visits Xerox PARC, realizes
future is in graphical computing,
and grabs it for Apple, Macintosh
project begins.
> Apple goes public.
X
Xerox doesn't have
a due.
ORIGINAL SIN.
The Apple Macintosh 0.5.
Welcome to EdUrt.
We didn't create comp Liters but we
remade them in our own image SO that
people could use them and so that they
would want to use them.
Ovei the years the Macintosh operating
system has helped millions of people do
just that, by providing a simple,
mniLcive approach chat makes all
aspects of computing easier.
m.
Wb co we began defining a new software
architecture that would take us into the
future, we had two clear objectives: to
enhance our traditional strengths, and to
create an Operating system thaE would
transcend rhe competition , setting standards
into the next century.
j- Eden., rhe new Macintosh
f operating system rhar will lea we other
L^-n operating systems feeling cut out.
Imitated not equaled.
» can barn titcrr abovf Eden by visiting vi at wiw rdm.apfit. mm « Mf Wf V B
#r by catling 300-536-9696 fir infer mar ran by fix. ' ' *W w* " * T
Mtt^r tnnrvl .>+. J* Arr ifr ^Mh^*** irti 4 im
Rhapsody is
far too mushy
a name for
the new OS.
Rename it Eden
and create an
ad campaign
exploiting the
belief that
Satan resides
in Redmond*
Wa Jobs becomes Apple chair.
m Apple becomes the first PC company
to reach US$1 billion in annual sales.
I IBM releases its first PC;
the safe brand name will
ultimately allow an inferi¬
or technology to domi¬
nate the market.
V The company doesn't done its
machines. Meanwhile, more than
100 computer manufacturers churn
out ISM PC knockoffs.
WIRED JUNE 1997
i Wired;
John Sculley is
wooed away from
Adopt, acquire, and
create new technolo¬
gies that can give
Apple yet another tech¬
nological edge* Such technologies
include Integrated full-text search
in the OS (Apple does have V-Twin),
remote diagnostics by phone,
N et-o ri e nte d a u to m attt soft w a re
upgrades (like Castanet), and a bet¬
ter/fa ster/m ore robust file system.
Bruce Horn, member of original
Macintosh development team
31 . Build a PDA for less than $250
that actually does something:
a) cellular email
b) 56-channel TV
c) Internet phone.
12. Advice to Gil Amelio: shorter
speeches, tighter pants.
11. Change the visual presenta¬
tion of marketing/advertising
to signal that real change Is under
way. Foe u s atte nti o n (o p e rat tonally
and in marketing
terms) on Apple's concrete growth.
Boldly setting the milestones along
the path to rebirth and hitting them
is the only way to evolve the mar¬
keting message that so far has
focused on undelivered promises.
34. Port the OS to the Intel
platform, with its huge amount
of investment in hardware, software,
training, and experience. Don't ignore
it; co-opt it Operating systems are
dependent on installed base; that
is your biggest hurdle now. It is
not the head-to-head, feature-set
comparison between Windows
and Mac 05.
It's time for Apple
hardware to extend
the software. Your
spatial metaphor
- the desktop and
its components -
should be used as
a starting point
for product design.
a
*
ft ifT
rffifr**
Q
1-3
9 If
rtIP
T3
. ■■ •‘",i
Pepsi to become
president/OEO,
15, Get IVtklinux and BeOS to run
on RowerBooks,
36. Clone the PowerBook. When
the shabbily made 5300s started to
fall apart, catch on fire, and explode,
a lot of Apple customers were forced
to turn to Wintel for laptops. There
was no place else to go. If clones
had been available, the users might
have stayed in the family.
37, Take advantage of NeXT's
easy and powerful OpenStep
programming tools to entice a
new generation of Mac software
developers*
18, Make it easier for ISVs to
make applications for both Apple
and Wintel environments - if not
at the desktop, then certainly at
the server. Without these innova¬
tions, the only hope is to keep what
is left of the insta lled base*
19. Build a laptop that weighs
2 pounds.
40, Cash in on millennium fever
with an ad campaign that portrays
Apple as a return to basics, a redis¬
covery of simplicity and purity,
a rejection of complexity,
41, Arrange venture
funding for new,
cutting-edge multi-
media publishers
- this is where
you shine and
where the pub¬
lic will become
interested again*
r Tired:
Lisa computer is introduced.
The $9,995
machine proves
to be an over¬
priced flop.
^ Apple unveils the
Macintosh and airs the
now-legendary N1 984"
commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, dur¬
ing the third quarter of the Super Bowl.
The Orwellian scene depicts the IBM
world being shattered by a new machine.
jThe commercial is never shown again,
Apple fails to successfully push Macintosh
to the business market*
The company rolls1
out the LaserWriter, the
original affordable PostScript laser
printer, and Aldus releases PageMaker, one
of the first desktop publishing programs.
Wozntak resigns. Jobs resigns after
failing to oust Sculley in an attempted
boardroom coup* Apple lays off l ,200
em ployees, one-fifth of Its workforce, and
posts its first quarterly loss.
Microsoft introduces Windows 1,0.
> Apple debuts the Mac SE
and Mac II, which make
the Macintosh line a viable,
powerful fam ily of computers.
The company announces plans
to create an independent software
company, later known as Claris.
The company ignores suggestions
to license its OS*
WIRE D JUNE 1997
DIO
IMAGE: PRQJEKTGRUPPE 7-5 BERLIN ; IU0TKE' KELL* YON
42. Organize a telethon. Hire
Jer ry Lewis to get dewy-eyed over
the new line of Mac products.
43. Remain committed to the
openDVD Consortium, addressing
the issues of implementing digital-
ve rsatil e-d isc techno logy. Yo u Ve
always been a bridge between the
entertainment and high tech indus¬
tries, Maintain it.
44. Continue your research in
voice recognition. It's the only way
you're going to compete in video-
conferencing and remote access.
45. Don't raise the Mac OS licens¬
ing fee. Cloners have helped stabi¬
lize and even increase market share
for the Mac OS; this keeps software
developers happy.
46. Stop wasting time on frivol¬
ities like Spartacus.the 20th-anni-
versary Mac. Get over yourself . . .
at least for a while.
47. Work on ways to make your
lower-end models truly upgrad¬
able. Giving customers a definite,
manageable upgrade path will
attract and hold customers. People
need to be able to upgrade and
expand, so they don't feel dead-
ended every time Apple changes its
mind. Upgrading a llvx to a Power
Mac is theoretically possible, but
there are so many hardware and
software problems that the experi¬
ence is enough to turn a nun into
a crack-smoking serial killer.
48. Get Ben & Jerry's to name
a flavor after you. Suggestion:
Apple Silicon Chip Supreme.
49. Bring back Andy Hertzfeld
and the other original Mac folks to
explain to the executive team that
simplicity and design elegance are
what made the Mac attractive to
developers in the first place and
what still makes the Mac unique:
automounting diskettes, self-config¬
uration of hardware, direct manipu¬
lation of files, free-form filenames
with spaces and no three-dot suf¬
fixes, uniform user interface across
applications.
50. Give Steve Jobs as much
authority as he wants in new
product development. Let Gil
Amelio stick to operations. There's
no excitement at the top, and
Apple's customers want to feel like
they've joined a computer revolu¬
tion. Even if Jobs fails, he'll do it
with guns a-blazin', and well be
spared this slow water torture that
Amelio has subjected us to.
51 . Speak to the consumer.
Not to the press, not to the com¬
petition, but to the people who
grew up with the Mac.
52. Return to the heady days
of yore by insisting that Steve
Jobs regrow his beard.
53. Recharge your strategy for
Europe, where the PC market pene¬
tration is lower than in the US and
the population is educated and inter¬
ested in high tech. There's an open¬
ing there that doesn't exist here,
54. Sell off the laser printer busi¬
ness. Create an auction between
HP and Lexmark International. Get
Japanese companies into the act.
Sell to one that's already making
money in the printer business or
* Mac World Expo begins.
Apple posts its first
billion-doJIar quarter.
MACWORLD Expo/Brnton
August 53-32. 1969
Program Guide
W ' The company
gets sued by
Xerox, which
challenges
the validity of Apple's graph¬
ical user interface copyrights,
Apple Introduces its first portable
Mac, At more than 15 pounds, it's
instantly dubbed a "luggable.”
to one that makes related products.
That way, the buyer is getting
increased market share.
55. Give the company that buys
the printer business a contract
to manufacture printers with the
Apple trademark and then put it
in your existing distribution system.
Selling off the manufacturing assets
for printers provides a one-shot infu¬
sion of cash that reduces the drain
on the ba lance sheet You also make
a distribution margin on the printers
and associated supplies,
56. Stick to your schedule.
After canceling the long-awaited
Copland, you can't afford to miss
even one of your OS deadlines.
57. Bring back John Sculley.
He would provide a convenient
whipping boy.
58. Create dollar incentives to
attract software vendors to write
for the upcoming Rhapsody plat¬
form. You have cash in the bank -
use it
59* Invest heavily in Newton tech¬
nology, which is one area where
Microsoft can't touch you. Build
voice recognition and better ges¬
ture recognition into Newton, mak¬
ing a new environment for desktop,
laptop, and palmtop Macs. Newton
can also be the basis of a new gen¬
eration of embedded systems, from
cash registers to kiosks.
60. Abandon the Mach operating
system you just acquired and run
Windows NT kernel instead. This
would let Mac run existing PC pro¬
grams, (Microsoft actually has ►
Ob US District Court dismisses most
of Xerox's lawsuit against Apple.
Michael Spindler becomes presi¬
dent of Apple, Spindler, a straight¬
ahead businessman nicknamed
"The Diesel,” provides an unin¬
spiring figurehead,
Microsoft rolls out Windows 3,0,
Apple lays off 400 employees.
Listen to the great
^ cry that has gone up
from the software-
development and end-
user community. Online VRML,
MIDI development, and 3-D graph¬
ics acceleration all rocketed past
Apple; many of the most innovative
advancements on the Web need
to be experienced on a Windows
machine to be fully appreciated. As
a longtime user of the Mac and an
early and vocal fan of its simplicity
and power, I find it all a bit sad.
Jim Ludtke, graphic artist
Key question: Why
save Apple? It isn't
entirely obvious why
a company whose man¬
agement has done as much destruc¬
tion to shareholders, employees,
vendors, and customers ought to
be saved. More to the point, what
does save really mean? Besides why,
we need to consider who and what.
In addition to the implied how.
Having been flamed - mindlessly
and sometimes venomously - by
Guy Kawasaki's Mac-addict brown-
shirts, I hesitate to make any formal
recommendation. However, embold¬
ened perhaps by a glass of ade¬
quate merlot, 1 will offer this utterly
hypothetical speculation as grist
for lateral thinking: maybe Apple's
shareholders should sell what is left
of Apple to Steve Jobs's Pixar for, say,
$400 million.
Lewis J. Perelman, president of
Kanbrain Institute
m Power Book introduced;
Apple, IBM, and Motorola
team up to make PowerPC
RISC chips.
> IBM and Apple combine to
create Tali gent, an ill-conceived
and poorly executed attempt
to write a new object-
oriented operating
system.
WIRED JUNE 1997
Apple has always
* been too proud of
its marketing - since
r1 984 the company has
been a vertically integrated adver¬
tising agency. So get rid of all the
well-dressed charismatic engineers
and keep the ones who'll fix the
simple things wrong in the Mac OS,
like getting quickly and reliably on
the Internet. My wife and I think
Apple will pull through. We are
raising our children on Macintoshes.
We just bought them each a new
Performa. Of course, we are the lucky
ones. We can afford to buy Wintel
clunkers - holding our noses - if
Apple goes under.
Bob Metcalfe, inventor of
Ethernet, founder of 3Com
S I'm a Mac lover, but
i y last year I switched
p over completely to
l r Windoze because Apple
couldn't build a reasonable laptop.
I really want it to succeed, but I think
the company's finished. Software
vendors aren't turning out enough
code to keep the Mac as a really
good platform, even for family and
school stuff. This whole NeXT deci¬
sion seems to be a waste of time.
It should have been sold to HP for
$35 per share a year and a half ago.
Maybe if Apple caves in, Windows
will get so much market share that
the Department of Justice will inter¬
vene and break up Microsoft,! think
Window's competition is really the
NC- and WebTV-type box. Which is
truly sad.
Milo Medin, president of @Home
Windows NT working on Mac hard¬
ware, It also has emulation of Mac
programs with NT running on both
Power PC and x86.)
61 * Ink a promotion/development
deal with Shaquille O'Neal; intro¬
duce designer Shaqintosh model
62. Build a computer that doesn't
crash.
63. Make Java work on your 05.
Then develop an enterprise com¬
puting strategy in partnership with
Sun. Java is not a magic bullet, but
supporting it will keep Mac owners
happy and prevent them from look¬
ing elsewhere.
64. Team up with Sony, which
wants to get into the computer
business in a big way - think
Sony MacMan.
65. Roll out the Mac Plus again
as a hip retro machine. Make it
really, really uncool to use whlzzy,
leading-edge PCs.
66. Get the top systems inte*
grators to push NeXT's WebObjects
as the ultimate intranet/Internet
development environment You cor¬
nered desktop publishing. What do
you think the Web is becoming?!
Besides, there's plenty of room in
this area for new tools.
67. Tighten the focus on your
publishing niche - both print and
electronic - and seek to dominate it
in every way.
68. Retain your Apple Fellows
at all costs. With Don Norman and
Alan Kay recently leaving, there is
a serious drain in the Big Think
department.
69. Change your name to Snapple
and see if you can dupe Quaker
Oats into buying you.
70. Simplify your PC product line.
Reduce the number of Apple moth¬
erboards and the number of distinct
Apple system models,
71 . Become a graphic design com¬
pany and dominate your niche the
way Sun and Silicon Graphics do.
72. Try the industry-standard
serial port plug. RS-422 should
be a last resort.
73. Rename the company Papaya
and begin an aggressive South
Pacific marketing campaign.
74. Solidify the management
team. Pushing people out or allow¬
ing them to leave does not inspire
the remaining troops.
75. Speed sells. Push your advan¬
tage on the speed of the processor.
This summer, you'll release Macs
using 450- and 533-MHz processors.
Your lead over Intel will be remark¬
able. Brag about this. Once the oper¬
ating system shifts toward the end
of this year, the PowerPC will really
kick some ass (the 05 is a major drag
on the processor). Intel is forever mar¬
keting the speed of its chips. Make
it clear that yours are much faster.
76. Make damn sure that
Rhapsody runs on an Intel chip.
Write a Windows NT emulator
for Rhapsody's Intel version.
fp. Wired:
Launches consumer-oriented ink Apple ships the 10 millionth Mac.
Performa line.
I
Tired;
Initiates trend toward Macintosh
brand confusion.
by Apple releases
the Newton personal
digital assistant: great
poor execution,
is relieved of his
position as CEO, leaving
Spindler in charge.
Mix: OS
The firm introduces
the Power Mac family,
the first Macs
to be based
on the PowerPC chip.
Mac OS is licensed to Power
^Computing, now the most
successful Mac clone maker.
77. Lose the cybercafes idea.
Geez, what were you thinking?
78. Turn Claris loose so it can do
some real damage.
79. Exploit your advantage in the
K-12 education market. That's the
future. Most students use the com¬
puter as a true multimedia tool, and
their technological expertise is very
sophisticated, especially when com¬
pared to the typical business user.
80. Maintain existing loyalty at
all costs. Use incentives like free
upgrades and stock certificates.
Gimmicky? Sure, But it helps create
a bond and a religious following.
81 . Merge with Sega and become
a game company.
82. Give the first Apple made
exclusively for Windows a cheeky
name (like The Big Apple) and an
irresistible industrial design like
the 20th -anniversary Macintosh.
Introduce it with a mammoth ad
campaign that shows the makers
of other Windows PCs running for
cover, as if they've been feari ng
Apple's monstrous entry into their
market for decades,
83. Develop proprietary programs
that run only on Macs. Crow about
them.
84. Effectively communicate your
game plan to employees, customers,
and developers. People need a
strong presentation of what's going
to happen.
85. Quit making each Mac in
a platform-specific case, with plat-
The company has $ 1 billion in
back orders - and not enough parts
|— to fill them,
r Hi Microsoft releases
Windows 95, which
mimics the Mac GUI
better than ever.
w
WIRED JUNE ) 997
020
AMELIO: DAVID POWtHS; MfN5:KY: LOUI5 FABIAN B ACH R ACH/COU RTtSY OF MIT MEDIA US
form -specific parts* Make one case
for desktop systems and another
for laptops. The case, chassis, and all
that stuff needs to be as upgradable
as the system software used to be,
86, Organize a very large bake
sale - look what cookie sales have
done for the Girl Scouts.
87* Price the CPUs to sell* Offer
novice users the ability to enter
the Mac market at a competitive
price point and move up the power
curve as their level of sophistication
increases* The initial price keeps
new buyers away.
88* Acknowledge that there are
people with repetitive stress
injuries. Why do loyal customers
have to go to a weird third-party
vendor to get a split keyboard?
92* With each new Mac, include
a CD-ROM that explains the Apple
family tree and future plans.
93* Develop a way to program
that requires no scripting or coding.
94* Maintain differentiation
between Wintei and Apple* Cross-
platform means Apple OS on Intel
boxes, not just add-ins to Windows.
Making the Mac more like Windows,
or making all technologies "cross-
platform/' is a going-out-of-busi-
ness strategy* Extend and improve
the Mac's capabilities to handle
Wintei data and emulate Wintei for
those applications that require it,
95* Fight back. Stand up for your¬
self with ads that respond to the
negative press. Dispute, in particu¬
lar, reports that Apple's PC market
share has fallen. While this is true,
overall Mac OS sales have risen*
89* Create a chemical that cleans
the Mac's pale gray plastic - they
look cruddy after a year, and normal
solutions either don't work or seem
like they 11 corrode the machine*
90* Design a desktop model -
call it La Dolce Vita - with a built-
in cappuccino maker (featuring
anything but Starbuck's - Wash¬
ington's other great homogenized.
96* Partner with Oracle, using its
technology for a backend database
with your friendly face.
97* Have Pixar make 3061,
A Space Odyssey, with HAL replaced
by a Mac,
93* Testimonials* Create commer¬
cials featuring real-life people in sit¬
uations where buying a Mac (or
switching to a Mac) saved the day.
91. Start a new special projects
group led by either Jobs or another
passionate and creative designer to
create the next "insanely great" tech¬
nology. This time, focus on rolling
the technology into the existing
Mac line; make sure developers are
inspired and in the loop.
99. Reincorporate as a nonprofit
research foundation. Instead of
buying computers, customers would
buy memberships, just as they do
in the National Geographic Society.
They'd receive an Apple computer
as part of their membership perks.
Dues would be tax-deductible.
Mac market share bounces
back, thanks to success of clones*
Spindler is replaced
^ T by Gif Amelio, another
bland corporate suit.
** Apple posts staggering
$740 million Q2 loss.
Company lays off 4,100 workers.
Your (eventual) profits would also
be tax-exempt, and the foundation
could continue its noble battle to
keep Microsoft on its toes*
100. Build a second graphics/
video product based on the con¬
nection with Pixar (and therefore
with Disney). Steve Jobs and Michael
Eisner should define it.
101. Don't worry* You'll survive.
It's Netscape we should really
worry about, m m m
Contributors: Mark R. Anderson,
Ronald RAndring Sr., Andrew
Anker, Carla Barros, Dave Barry,
David Batstone, John Battelle,
Michael Behar, Jackie Bennion,
Gareth Branwyn,Van Burnham,
Seth Chandler, Tom Claburn, Chris¬
tine Comaford, Peter Corbett, John
Couch, Douglas Coupland, S. Russel
Craig, Mark Dery, David Diamond,
Dennis Dimos, Nikki Echler, Laura
Fredrickson, Jesse Freund, Simson
Garfinkel, Steve Gibson/Tim Goeke,
Jeff Green wald, Jacquard W. Guenon,
Joseph Haddon, David Hakala,
Russell Hires, Rex Ishibashi, Dave
Jenne, Amy Johns, Richard Kadrey,
Philippe Kahn, Kristine Kernjndra
Lowenstein, Regis McKenna, Warren
Michelsen, Russ Mitchell, Eugene
Mosier, Nicholas Negroponte,
Eduardo Parra, Lisa Pitarille, John
Plunkett, Gary Andrew Poole,
Spencer Reiss, Jack Rickard, Louis
Rossetto, Peter Rutten, Winn
Schwartau, Kristian Schwartz,
Brian Slesinsky, Richard Stallman,
Carl Steadman, Don Steinberg,
Julie Sullivan, Kathy Tafel, Ruth
Tooker, Joel Truher, Watts Wacker,
Michael Wise.
t Repurpose entirely
and sell actual apples
- the fruit, that is* It
:>u!d hybridize In spe¬
cial orchards south of Santa Clara,
California, and release Apple 1 ,0
in time for the fall pie season.
Jon Carroll, newspaper columnist
At a certain critical
' f point - perhaps five
UmJI years ago - Apple
stopped investing time,
effort, brainpower, and money in
continuing to make a better product.
Instead, it dissipated its energy on
everything but the Macintosh - on
Newton, Sweet Pea, Ka]eida,Taligent.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world
caught up.The last great engineer¬
ing task accomplished on the Mac
was the switch to PowerPC* However,
no new features went in. The com¬
pany that had been the leader in
operating systems found that It
could no longer write an operating
system - Copland was a disaster
that never shipped* It had to suffer
the ultimate ignominy of buying
one outside. The NeXT purchase is
too little too late. The Apple of the
past was an innovative company
that used software and hardware
technology together to redefine the
way people experienced comput¬
ing. That Apple is already dead. Very
adroit moves might be able to save
the brand name. A company with
the letters A-P-P-L-L in its name
might survive, but it won t be the
Apple of yore.
Nathan Myhrvold, chief technol¬
ogy officer at Microsoft
Make a lightweight,
portable, palmtop
Mac. Ideally, it should
r be a wearable, with a
private eye screen and some sort
of half-keyboard. If Apple can't manu¬
facture this, it could make a deal with
another hardware maker. Wearables
are the future.
Marvin Minsky, Al pioneer
nan
WIRED JUNE 1997
PHOTO: AARON GOODMAN
Wired; What was it about the Telecommunications Act
that bothered you so much?
McCain; It was not a deregulatory bill! Three pages of
law have been turned into 800 pages of regulation* The
bill was ail attempt to ensure fair competition by pro¬
tecting segments of the industry, yet when you have open
competition, the consumer is the one who benefits. I saw
everybody represented at the negotiating table when
we were working on this bill - except for the people
who actually own telephones or television sets or sub¬
scribe to cable.
Unfortunately, many of the results I foresaw turned
out to be reality. Phone rates have gone up. Long dis¬
tance rates have gone up. Cable rates are going up.
Additional costs are being borne by the consumer -
which is exactly the opposite of what was predicted.
Meanwhile, enormous power has been given over to
the FCC.
What do you think of FCC chair Reed Hundt?
FU say this on his behalf: he warned everybody. He said,
“If you pass the bill in this form. Pm going to hire hun¬
dreds of people, and I'm going to have to issue thou¬
sands of pages of regulations.* He wasn’t opposed to
the idea, but at least he told us what he was going to
do. He didn't surprise anyone.
But now that the Telecom Act has become law, what
can you do to change it?
The best tiling is to hold oversight hearings on various
aspects of the legislation. We've already held hearings
on the universal-service provisions, and they generated
a lot of controversy. We can also educate other senators
about the intended results of the legislation - and its
unintended consequences. The pressure to change will
come from the fact that the legislation failed to achieve
its staled objectives - to lower costs for consumers and
create a more deregulated environment. But having said
that, I don't think Congress will revisit the Telecom Act
this year.
You also favor auctioning off spectrum. That hasn't been
very popular in Congress.
It would be popular with American taxpayers. We're
busy attempting to balance the budget, and by some
estimates, we could come up with US$37 billion of
new revenue by auctioning off spectrum.
Spectrum is like a river or a piece of land owned
by the American taxpayers, and when someone uses
it, the taxpayers should get some benefit. But the
broadcasters have been able to frighten people by
saying that if they have to pay for spectrum, it will
be the end of free over-the-air TV. That simply is
not true. The whole thing is ample testimony to the
power of the National Association of Broadcasters.
It’s the most powerful lobby that I've run into, and
Todd Lapp in (telstar@mred.com) is a section editor at
Wired.
it has powerful allies in Congress.
Does it bug you that broadcasters may now use their
free spectrum for services other than digital TV?
Yes, it's really disingenuous. But I don't blame them
for trying to get the best deal that they can for their
industry. That's their job.
How wilt we break the stalemate between the inter¬
ests of industry and law enforcement in setting cryp¬
tography policy?
It’s pretty clear that the administration’s crypto pro¬
posals will have a harmful effect upon the industry.
But we can’t completely ignore the warnings we get
from the heads of the FBI and the National Security
Agency. My next move will be to
set up negotiations to see if there
is some kind of position we can all
agree upon. That makes sense for
reasons of practicality, and not just
as a tactical move. If the president
of the United States vetoes a crypto
bill we pass, I doubt we’ll be able to
override his veto. We need to find a
middle ground.
What does that middle ground look
like?
I can't say yet, because I honestly
don't know what it is.
Do you think that the government
should be in the business of regu¬
lating online speech?
1 have to tell you - 1 worry about
that. My children occasionally visit
chat rooms, and all the obscenity
is disturbing. Endless strings of
obscenity are not enlightening or
uplifting at all. I'd like to restrain
it. I'd like to punch in the nose the
guy who keeps writing four-letter
words - first, because he's an idiot,
and second, because I think it's so
gross. But at the same time, I do not
want to infringe on people's consti¬
tutional rights.
How familiar are you with the Net?
Not nearly as much as I should be. I barely know how
to use it - and I emphasize barely .
Then who are you? How would you introduce yourself
to the technology community?
FU admit that I'm abysmally ignorant about a lot of
high tech issues, but Vm doing everything I can to
understand this industry.
To state the obvious: telecommunications is the
future of America’s economy, and 1 come at it with
a commitment to the principles of a deregulated,
free- market economy. Congress, in my view, should
get out of the way. ■ ■ ■
In Washington, Senator John McCain
has become a nightmare incarnate
for telco lobbyists and broadcast bar¬
ons. A former US Navy fighter pilot
who spent more than five years as
a POW in North Vietnam, the hard-
nosed Arizona Republican staunchly
supports auctioning spectrum air¬
waves to the highest bidder and
radically deregulating the telecom¬
munications industry. In 1996, he
was the only Senate Republican to
vote against the Telecommunica¬
tions Act, complaining that the bill
preserves existing TV, cable, and
telephone oligopolies by imposing
a new regulatory framework just as
cumbersome as the 1930s-era struc¬
ture it replaced, McCain's dissent
seemed futile until last November,
when Senator Larry Pressler (R-South
Dakota) suffered an election defeat
that left McCain next in line to serve
as chair of the mighty Senate Com¬
merce Committee. Wired spoke with
McCain to find out what may hap¬
pen now that last year's gadfly has
emerged as Capitol Hill's newest
telecom powerbroker.
020
WIRED JUNE 1997
Director: MarkDippe
Studio: New Line Cinema
Estimated cost: $43 million
f/>c: Industrial Light & Magic
£?S' PRULFl PRRISI vtmi-
c A/too / to tz o n~oc
i / /\ t t\t list tut It \n u
PREHIEU OF THIS SOWER'S 810 SPECIRL EFFECTS WHIES.
It's no secret that big-screen
blockbusters are fixated on spe-
dal effects. It's not so much that
character development and plot
twists disappear in the summer
as that they're drowned out by
the big bang. The only thing that
really matters is the f/x.
This year is no different, except
that high-concept pictures have
gone even higher tech. Here's a
behind-the^screens look at the
season's visual spectacles, where
millions in computer-generated
and animatronrc imagery flash by
in the blink of an eye.
Hollywood Reporter writer Paula
Parhi (pparisi@aol.com) cowrote
"Beyond Star Wars" in Wired 5.02.
With its mutating characters and
epic struggle between good and
evil, Todd McFarlane's comic Spawn
was begging for the big screen.
And who better to flesh out its
promise than two of the guys who
created the trailbiazing T-1000 in
Terminator 2\ Industrial Light &
Magic's Steve Williams and Mark
Dippe, here in his directing debut.
In one memorable scene, the
Clown (John Leguizamo) trans¬
mutes into his hellish alter ego, the
Violator. Morphing the 4-foot-6
Clown into a towering 12-foot-taif
reptile required a more complicated
version of the animation program
developed for Tl.The combatants
began their lives as a "chain" -
a skeleton built using Softimage.
Onto that was placed a skin "shell,"
created using Alias. The chain was
manipulated to deliver realistic
motion, the shell shaded and ren¬
dered to create a convincing sur¬
face. The synthespians were then
animated using Softimage and a
custom code called Cari that allows
shapes to be built on the fly.
ILM created natural body move¬
ment by using Softimage's inverse
kinematics then adding custom
code that allowed for changes in
the underlying bone structure. The
finished creatures each have about
four times as many control vertices
as the molten metal man in T2.
With the skin and motion perfected,
animators then used fienderman
to apply lighting and shading.
Director of animation Williams
says cinematic software is dosing
in on bitstream biology, with pro¬
grams that ever more accurately
replicate organic tissue: "Every¬
thing has been surface-based. In T2
we began experimenting beneath
a character's surface. Now we look
to copy nature's artwork." ■ ■ ■
□ so
WIRED JUNE 1997
Boasting a US$150 million budget
that lives up to its name, it's no sur^
prise that director James Cameron's
Titanic features some of the most
spectacular special effects ever
put on the big screen. Cameron
shot outdoor action sequences on
the decks of a life-size model of
the ill-fated luxury liner - 750 feet
long and six stories high - which
he eventually broke in half so he
could film the sinking bow.
One of the biggest challenges,
however, was a shot that depicts
the vessel's rapid underwater
descent. That was left to a computer
simulation designed by Cameron
and Titanic expert Ken Marschall,
then executed by visual effects
supervisor Rob Legato of Digital
Domain. The scene, which comes
in the first 15 minutes of the film,
revolves around the efforts of a
modern-day Titanic treasure hunter.
The 90 -second sequence, created
with Windows NT using LightWave
software, appears first as a display
Director:
James Cameron
Studio:
Paramount Pictures/
20th Century Fox
Estimated cost: $150 million*
f/fc
Digital Domain
on a computer monitor, then is
enlarged to fill the entire movie
screen* "As the ship sinks, it tilts,
and the stern rises out of the
water, higher and higher in the
frame," explains Legato. "Jim
didn't have us build what would
have been beneath the water line
- the propellers and the rest of the
hull and all that. All that will be
added digitally, and you'll never
be able to tell the difference.”
Later, when the simulation
shows the ship's funnels breaking
off, a voice-over explains that the
massive cylinders functioned like
a giant toilet flush, sucking in
everything, including people.
"Every other Titanic film depicts
the sinking as this kind of polite
disaster," Legato notes."By the
time you finish seeing this movie,
you'll know what a truly horrible
evening it was/' ■ ■ ■
WIRED JUNE 19 9 7
Q2B
PHOTO- CHIU IT l ME LOSS
Holy icicles! Who's that bringing
the big chill to the rooftops of
Gotham, with the Gaped Crusader
and Boy Wonder in hot pursuit?
It's the epitome of sangfroid, Mr.
Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger).
In addition to its fresh crop of
villains and a variety of innovative
Bat vehicles, Batman & Rabin fea¬
tures some cool new weaponry,
including the megawatt Freeze
Ray* The, er, firearm is essentially
a prop effect, its frosty spew gen¬
erated by computer and painted
onto each frame, explains visual
effects supervisor John Dykstra*
"You have to track the original
live action, match the perspective
of the gun, and duplicate the
camera move from the overall
scene, if there was one* In this
film, there were lots of them. The
camera was rarely stationary."
In this case, a computer-gener¬
ated light beam was synchronized
with CO- vapor bursts emitted by
the gun on the set, where director
of photography Stephen Gold-
blatt anchored the illusion with
"reactive lighting" that riddled
the area as if the ray were present.
The digita!"beam overlay" had
several elements, including a core
["similar to the vapor emerging
from the mouth of the gun"}, a
surround ["a spiral of energy"),
and a bright pulse that runs down
the beam. No mean feat when
you consider that the coldhearted
criminal is not slow on the trigger
(these ice attacks figure into
some 40 shots). Suffice it to say
Freeze's victims chill out. ■ ■ ■
WIRED JUNE 1997
020
How do you film a massive flying
saucer that crashes through a giant
globe and then plows into the
earth? For Eric Brevig, visual effects
supervisor for Men in Black , it
involved a melange of effects, rang¬
ing from leading-edge computer
graphics to tricks that have been
around as long as the movies.
The scene takes place in Flushing
Meadows Corona Park, Queens, the
site of the 1 964 World's Fair. Shot
down by Tommy Lee Jones and
Will Smith, the spacecraft smashes
through the fair's signature uni-
sphere before skidding toward our
..
:^4-C5 Hr!
l
heroes at about 200 mph." We're
talking," Brevig says, "about some¬
thing the size of the Queen Mary."
The saucer, which appears to
be 20 yards wide in the film, was
actually a 9-foot steel model,
filmed on a soundstage by Indus¬
trial Light & Magic north of San
Francisco, Three smalt unispheres,
each 12 feet in diameter, were also
built."The first one was sacrificial;''
Brevig explains/'We wanted to
smash it and study how it came
apart, where the pieces flew, and
what was left. Then we brought
out the nice-looking ones and
shot the scene for real."
The saucer was attached to a
vertical pole and mounted on a
guide rail running beneath the set.
As the vessel shot along the track
and crashed through the sphere,
the pole tripped switches setting
off pyrotechnics that make the ship
appear to be burning. The saucer
moved at a real speed of roughly
30 mph - "frightfully fast on a 100-
foot soundstage/' Brevig says.
I Director.
Barry Sonnenfeld
Studio:
Columbia Pictures
Estimated cost: $60 million
f/x:
Industrial Light & Magic
Once filming was done, an f/x
expert took charge, digitally eras¬
ing the poles and rigs holding the
saucer. The actors were positioned
in the final composite, a layering
process also done on the computer.
Fine-tuning included filming some
dust elements against a black back¬
ground, which were then compos¬
ited into the shot, appearing to
wrap around the actors/'lt's little
touches like that," Brevig notes,
"that will make it look like it all
happened for realF'i ■ ■
Cr
ca
or
cc
When animatronics whiz Walt Conti
did his first design for Anaconda,
the snake was too cute- Real ana¬
condas, it seems, have big, adorable
eyes - the better to see you with
in the water. So Conti fit Co, at Edge
Innovations Incorporated fiercer
features from other snakes for a
suitably savage appearance.
The film stars a 1, 500-pound,
25-foot warrior snake and a larger
40-foot queen, which weighs 3,000
pounds. Each boasts urethane skin
with 60,000 scales, while the mech¬
anized inner workings contain 140
joints and roughly 40 miles of wir¬
ing - all driven by 250-horsepower
hydraulic units,
"Snakes have the ability to move
very slowly and then suddenly give
quick bursts of speed," Conti says.
To that end, the main movements
were controlled by a computer sys-
tern equivalent to 300 PCs running
200-Mhz processors while puppe¬
teers on the set used joysticks to
fine-tune the action.
Scenes that required slithering
a considerable distance, wrapping
around a person, or twisting in the
air relied on digital serpents created
by Sony Pictures lmageworks,"The
close-ups and a lot of shorter cuts
were Walts snake," says Image works
CG supervisor John McLaughlin.
"But when you see a full-body
snake, or when it interacted very
closely with humans - say, squeez* *
ing or eating them - it was the CG
snake." Silicon Graphics boxes
spawned the digital reptiles, pri¬
marily using Alias software. The big¬
gest feat for the computer jocks was
pulling off extended interaction
between CG snakes and real actors,
"It's been done before," Conti says,
"but not at this level." ■ m m
Talk with Paula Paris! live
Wednesday, June 4, at 6 p.m.
POT in the Wired Talk room at
They could have been recruited in the gyms of the best engineering schools.
The technojocks at Starwave have created a unique culture
Left to right: Patrick Naughton, president and CTO of Sfa
Tom Phillips, president of joint ventures;
and Mike Slade, chair an
■ ■ 0w5s the song go? “That ain't working, that's
the way you do it * . *
Robert Temple was playing ice hockey with his boss
and drinking Henry Weinhard’s on tap eight hours
ago. Now he’s sitting at a terminal piled high with
LEGO and superhero playthings, showing me where
Barry Bonds is likely to hit the ball if he’s up against
a left-handed pitcher in a losing game at 3Com Park,
Oh yeah, and with the count in his favor. There’s a
virtual ball field on the screen with dots - lots of dots
- for the fair balls Bonds hit in 1995 and 1996: Red
dots for grounders* Black ones for line drives* Blue
ones for fly balls*
You want just home runs? No problem* Temple, in
shorts and a hockey shirt, gym hag at his feel, hits a
couple of keys, and the dots vanish - except for a
clump of red ones out in left field. It's just the kind of
addictive feature that might push a garden-variety
online sports fan over the edge and into 12-step territo¬
ry, Temple wrote the Java applet that makes it happen,
A little over 40 minutes ago, Todd Greene was steal¬
ing rebounds from his boss at the Seattle Athletic
Club gym* Now he’s parked at his computer, trying
to settle an owners5 dispute in Fantasy Basketball,
ESPNET SportsZone’s automated online version of
rotisserie baseball * do-it-yourself dream teams.
Young, bald, and
and made ESPNET SportsZone the Number One destination site on the Web.
With Disney as their new investor, they’re poised for their highest score.
By David Diamond
Photographs by Rex Rystedt
carrying what looks like about 2 percent body fat,
Greene is editing a report to the fictional league com¬
missioner. When he comes across a particularly funny
WIRED JUNE 1997
Q3D
line, he shouts it out to the rest of the Fantasy League
backroom crew - a couple of guys with hair, still wet
from the postgame shower - and high fives fly. For
franchise owners (it costs US$50 a season to join or
$20 annually for SportsZone subscribers) who screw
up and pick loser rosters, these guys have a policy:
sure, you can get your money back - if you cry over
the phone.
Forty-one-year-old Tom Phillips was born to run,
which is what he’s doing right now, up a pine-tree-
covered hill outside Bellevue, Washington, in the
middle of an otherwise busy weekday afternoon.
Without missing a breath, he’s explaining the ratio¬
nale behind online sports: “Numbers are the lan¬
guage of sports, Pre-Internet, no medium offered
sports data the way fans want it, need it, and
demand it ; ”
Phillips is president of joint ventures at Starwave
Corporation, SportsZone’s co-owner with ESPN, the
TV sports giant. As part of his job, he trains a com¬
pany team for the Hood To Coast relay and leads a
weekly noontime Ultimate Frishee match (this is
granola-fueled Seattle, after all). Like many of his
colleagues, he’s a New York refugee who still gets
pumped about the rich texture of life beyond the
Hudson - conducting business in running shorts,
and the little entertainment company whose other
properties include Mickey Mouse - it’s a screaming
success, one of the few nonsex sites with users rabid
enough to actually pay hard cash (a dollar a day,
$4.95 a month, or $39.95 a year) to log on to Sports-
Zone Premium, a grab bag of special features. And
for the technojocks who make it happen, it’s a 24-7
world: tough athletic competition one minute, nail-
biting deadline sports coverage and mind-scrambling
technology immersion the next - Web publishing as
a contact sport.
Sports as technology, technology as sport: Sports-
Zone is pushing two envelopes. It’s about a content
machine that’s designed to be equally accessible -
transparent, in software-jock lingo - to no-tech
sports-nut editors and users alike. It’s about data¬
bases loaded with literally every stat anyone’s ever
thought of - in virtually real time. It’s about engi¬
neering that eschews vanilla HTML for dynamic
objects and custom push channels. IPs about mania¬
cal fans, from South Bend, Indiana, or the South
Pole. IPs about killer execution meets dream content.
And it’s about having the time of your life helping
other people have fun.
SportsZone shares its Bellevue headquarters with the
rest of Starwave’s ambitious Web lineup - Family
Sports as technology, technology as
information machine geared to
for example. But he can also do the corporate rap
as easily as he runs a 5:20 mile: “SportsZone gives
you up-to-the-minute data and the ability to analyze
it every which way” he says during a break to point
at the bank of clouds where the Olympic Mountains
should be visible, maybe five months from now.
“Millions of people who love sports are wondering
how they lived without it,”
sport: SportsZone is pushing two envelopes
no-tech sports-nut editors and users alike.
It’s about killer
Jock itch is an occupational hazard at SportsZone,
home-cum-locker room of the reigning heavyweight
champs of online sports. On a good day - say, a busy
college football weekend or anytime during the NCAA
Final Four - with hits pouring in by the millions,
SportsZone’s not just the world’s busiest sports Web
site. It’s the Net’s busiest destination, period, trashing
all but the two or three top search engines and navi¬
gation sites.
For fans, it’s the place to go for instant scores, live
audio cybercasts, and video highlights, to read about
Dennis Rodman’s latest herpes lawsuit, or to dork
around with stats on Frank Thomas’s batting average
against Roger Clemens. For its owners - the world’s
richest sports nut, Microsoft cofounder Paul Mien,
Planet, Outside Online (a joint venture
with Outside magazine), the Hollywood -
geared Mr. Showbiz, and the recently launched
CelebS ite. The building is part of a nondescript free-
wayside office park, but any resemblance to the usual
high tech warren ends at the door. There’s Foosball in
the lobby, Gatorade in the kitchen, after-hours foul-
shot contests - even a couple of women among the
30 programmers, producers, and editors.
The stereotypical Web developer’s office tends to
black clothes and body piercings; here gym bags,
sweaty’ towels, and antifungal cream are pail of the
decor. It’s a place where potential career detonators
- this actually happened - include getting caught
using somebody else’s towel in the on-site locker
room. “We tend to hire to a type * says Starwave
chair and CEO Mike Slade. “A lot of people come
here from the work-really-hard-then-burn-it-
off school.”
Some of the lineup comes with big names as well,
Kentfkld, California-based contributing writer David
Diamond (ddiamond@well.com) wrote a The Fast
American Hero'' in Wired 4J1.
WIRED JUNE 1997
nap
9 r
CIV
r\
I \
It’s about an
It’s about databases loaded with every stat ever kept,
execution meets dream content. And it’s about having the time of your life doing it.
*\ 41
especially by Web start-up standards.
Slade, a former newspaper sportswriter,
came from Microsoft, where he was
product manager for Excel. In his New
York incarnation, Phillips was the found¬
ing publisher of Spy magazine. Starwave
president and CTO Patrick Naughton, who
can whack a hockey puck with semipro
power and grace* was one of the key
players behind the development of Sun
Microsystems’ Java. With 300 employees*
Starwave is small enough that all three
execs can split their time between Sports-
Zone and the smaller sites.
It doesn't hurt, of course, to have a
billionaire proprietor - especially one
who can lend his regulation-size indoor
home basketbail court for Monday-night
intramural games. (Allen has another
court in Portland, Oregon; his NBA Trail
Blazers play there.) And if that’s not
enough, there's also SportsZone's co-own¬
er, ESPN, the pioneering all-sports TV
network. Based in Bristol* Connecticut -
and already a Disney property - the cable
giant brings veteran commentators, solid
relations with athletes, brand credibility*
and cid-sales help. Not to mention an audi¬
ence of 71 million.
What that adds up to is the muscle, fin¬
ancial and otherwise, that has let Slade
& Co. build an engineering powerhouse
- SportsZone’s core idea from day one
in April 1995. The site’s heart is Bulldog,
a custom-built in-house publishing tool
that parses data from 15 simultaneous
wire feeds* assembling it into thousands
of carefully crafted software objects - by
team, by player, by statistical category -
that are continuously updated in as near
to real lime as the feeds allow.
It’s a torrent of information second
only to Wall Street's staggering output:
Major League Baseball, the NBA, the
NFL* the NHL, and NASCAR, pro tennis,
and golf Plus dozens of lesser spoils enti¬
ties (whose fans, needless to say, don’t see
it that way), including Major League Soc¬
cer, the Canadian Football League, the
International Hockey League, the East
Coast Hockey League, American Associa¬
tion Baseball, Texas League Baseball, and
on down the list.
“We!re dealing with hundreds of mil¬
lions of pieces of live data," explains
Naughton, who split his chin twice on igs ►
WIRED JUNE 19 97
Steven Rooke breeds
these fantastical Tolklen-
esque landscapes -
literally.
Inspired by Karl Sims
and Richard Dawkins,
Rooke models his com¬
puter-simulated art
on the evolution of life
itself. Tooled up with
a superfast Silicon
Graphics IndigoZ and his
own genetic algorithms!
he creates a population
of around 1 00 images on
his computer.
"1 examine each image
and assign It an aesthetic
fitness score. "Then!
explains the former geol¬
ogist/*! command the
population to spawn."
After a flurry of sexual
activity a mosaic of
images begins to fill
the screen.
You could say it's art
imitating life in the pur¬
est sense.
Shown here is Hang¬
ing Gardens ofLorien,
and you can experience
more of Rooke's Cam¬
brian explosions at www
. co n cen trie , n et/^Sro oke /.
-Jackie Bennion
Jackie Bennion is assis
tant managing editor
at Wired.
On a dreary day in England early this
year, Jyoti Mishra (aka White Town)
mailed out five copies of an EP he'd
recorded In his bedroom using an
Atari ST, free software, and an oid
muititrack. Without any promotion,
his song "Your Woman" - a catchy
f80s-sounding slice of technopop -
was picked up by BBC Radio 1 and
put into heavy rotation. Four weeks
later, the unknown 30-year-old from
Derbyshire had signed with EMI and
entered the UK charts at Number One,
Whet Following the success of your single, the media
have been quick to portray you as a stereotypical com¬
puter geek. Are you?
Mishra: I would say Fm a geek but not in the English
way, English people don't understand what it means.
To me, a geek is anyone who has a passion for what
they do, yet in Britain the term is only ever associated
with technology. In America you can he a geek in any-
thing from horse riding to pottery.
Do you think the British press is still ignorant about
technology?
Very, What gets to me is that the papers won't refer to
Sting - who plays the double bass
- as a PC nerd, even though he
uses far more technology than I
do. Forget the fact that the double
bass has probably passed through
countless sampling systems and
digital edits; if you do a certain
type of music, they will label you
under a certain category. But
what else are they going to say
about me? Big fat bloke out of
nowhere, must be a computer
geek, must spend all his time
looking at dirty pictures on the
The single "Your Woman" is possibly the most basically
recorded song ever to get to Number One in the UK.
What equipment did you use?
Both the single and my album were made with an old
Tascarn 688 multitrack tape recorder, an Atari ST, and
a free sequencer disc I got from the front of a com¬
puter magazine because I couldn't afford a “proper”
sequencer. In fact, I just bought my first piece of legal
software today - I've never had enough money before.
So are you going to get a state-of-the-art studio setup?
No. Art needs limits. One of the things wrong with con¬
temporary recording is that it's too generic, too sterile.
Technology can make things too perfect - it can dehu¬
manize you if you let it. You've got to fuck up the tech-
nology you've got rather than let the technology fuck
you up. It took me two days to get the beats slightly
out of time on “Your Woman” Two days! Getting them
in time took two seconds. At one point T was routing
The sync signal from the multitrack to my computer
through a little box I'd built to put in noise.
Today's music is all the same; all the studios have
the same gear, their Korg Mis, Lheir Trinitys, You can
hear those sounds a mile off. My album is full of
pops, clicks, buzzes, and hums, notes I don’t quite get
to, notes I miss completely - but it's all part of being
human. The perfection is in the imperfection.
iiOOM TO
White Town's success has brought
backroom production values center
stage and left music pundits vacil¬
lating between declaring him a hero
for lo-fi computer geeks and dismiss¬
ing him as a one-hit wonder. He has
since released the album Women in
Technology, made a splash in the US,
and left the big labels wondering
how long they can hold out before
cheap technology and the distribu¬
tive power of the Net take over their
turf. "The future for people like me,"
says Mishra, "is wide open."
Net, They fail to realize that the
Internet is about more than that.
How have you used the Net?
I had my own Web site, but it
wasn't really much cop because
Fm not that good at writing
HTML, I use the Net predomi¬
nantly for communicating,
through email and newsgroups
such as UK Music Alternative
and UK Music Miscellaneous,
That's how I met Anthony Chap¬
man from Collapsed Lung, who
did the remix for the 12-inch,
We started emailing each other
because we had similar tastes in music; when the
chance came up to get a remix commissioned, I asked
him to do it.
That wouldn't have happened without the Internet.
Similarly, there's loads of people I know in America -
like my oid label Parasol - who I met through Net con¬
versations. It's a different level of experience: people
aren't bothered by the superficial things. People buying
my records are doing so not because of what 1 look like
but because of the music itself
Ten years ago, it was impossible to produce a Number
One record in your bedroom. Is the prevalence of high-
quality affordable recording equipment going to
change the music industry?
Technology is one of the major democratizing forces
for art, especially pop music. If you were a fine -arts
painter, for example, how would you get an exhibition
at the Royal Academy? You’d have to know the right
people, hang out with them, move to London, and then,
maybe, after 15 years somebody might sponsor you.
Me, Fve come from nowhere and gone to Number One
with no help at all except for radio play, I know I got
a lucky break, but the future for people like me is wide
open; we're on a new frontier. Once digital cash is
sorted out, we're going to successfully make and dis¬
tribute the music ourselves; that's going to worry the
record labels. If you can publish to the world yourself,
why have a record company? They’re going to have to
give you a really good reason to sign.
So will the geek inherit the earth?
EMI's lawyers don't think so. ■ ■ ■
Daniel Pemberton (www.stateSl. co.uk/pemberton/)
also records and produces music in his bedroom . He
hasn't had a Number One hit yet
WIRED JUNE 19 97
mm
IMAGE: JASON BEIL
By Daniel Pemberton
using an old multitrack
Tascam and an Atari.
Four weeks later.
it entered the
Beijing Train Station
March 1997
FREWALL
AT ISPS, INTERNET CAFES, EVEN STATE
CENSORSHIP COMMITTEES, WE MEET THE WIRED OF CHINA
AND DISCOVER THAT THE TECHNOLOGY CHINA NEEDS
TO BUILD THE MOST POWERFUL COUNTRY ON EARTH IN
THE 21 ST CENTURY THREATENS TO UNDERMINE
THE INSTITUTIONS THAT RULE THE NATION.
If
In the hype-ridden
People’s Republic
of China, 1996
was the “Year of
the Internet."
Barely 1 in 10,000
Chinese is actually
wired. But the Net
takes aim squarely
at things that since
the days of Mao
have been the state's
exclusive domain.
INFORMATION
INDUSTRIES OF
CHINA UNITE!"
Xia Hong manages public relations for a year-old
company called China InfoHighway Space* It's
one of the slickest examples yet of the latest inno¬
vation on Beijing's frenetic corporate scene: Internet
service providers. China InfoHighway’s offices in
Beijing's Iiaidian District have tlie airy, glaringly
bright-lit open-plan arrangement favored by new-
look Chinese companies* Its logo - a sperniatozoid
yin-yang - decorates everything in sight. A banner
across the top of Its homepage blazes: “Information
Industries of China Unite!" As Xia Hong is happy
to make clear, that's not the only thing about China
InfoHighway that screams 1997-style Chinese
neosocialism:
The Internet is out of kilter with modern organiza¬
tional principles . It has failed to evolve effective means
of control Frankly, I see it as being just like the United
Nations. As you well know , that body is the most impo¬
tent in the world , and let's not even talk about it
being efficient or cost effective. All that confused yah -
hering, good and bad , right and wrong, all mired
up together
A network that allows individuals to do as they
please, lets them go brazenly wherever they wish , is a
hegemonistie network that harms the righ ts of others.
There’s no question about it: the Internet is an infor¬
mation colony From the moment you go online, you're
confronted with English hegemony. Its not merely a
matter of making the Net convenient for users in non-
English -spea king countries. People have to face the
fact that English speakers are not the whole world .
What’s the big deal about them, anyway?
Our ideal is to create an exclusively Ch inese- lan¬
guage network. It will be a Net that has Chinese char¬
acteristics , one that is an information superhighway
for the masses.
Ms. Z - she asked us not to use her name - is an 18-
year-old recent graduate of a private secretarial col¬
lege in Shanghai* We talked to her at the Shanghai
Internet Cafe on Jinling Donglu, a bustling thorough¬
fare in the center of the nearest thing China has to
Geremie R. Barme (geremie@coombs.anu.edu.au) is
a Senior Fellow at the Australian National University.
He co-wrote The Gate of Heavenly Peace, a documen¬
tary about the Tiananmen Square uprising that won
a 1997 Peabody Award. Sang Ye is a Chinese journalist
who divides his time between China and Brisbane, Aus¬
tralia , His most recent book is The Year the Dragon
Came (University of Queensland, 1996).
an urbane metropolis (at least until Hong Kong's
long-awaited return to the motherland on July 1):
If you want a well-paying job with a foreign firm,
it used to be you only needed to speak English and be
able to use a computer Now you also need Internet
know-how *
Today Fm here to send some emails to friends in
Canada. IPs much cheaper than the post office fax
service - Y70 (about US$8) for two sheets l Here I pay
Y30 for an hour. ; send my letters , have a look around
the Net , and get a cup of coffee thrown in free. Of
course IPs pricey ; but places like this aren't run for
country bumpkins. If you can't afford it, stay home
and drink boiled water!
We're living in an information society now 3 and
every idea is valuable * People who provide freeware
or shareware on the Net for others to download are
just so stupid. What a waste of effort! As for giving
other people ideas via the Net , you'd have to be a half¬
wit, Why let someone else profit from your ideas?
What I hate most about the Internet is that there
are so many wonderful shopping opportunities - all
the nice clothes and makeup - but l can't buy any of
it. For example, Chanel No , 19 costs nearly Y800
(US$96) in the Shanghai shops; on the Net , it's only
half that , including postage. But even if I had a for¬
eign-currency credit card,
it would be useless: cus¬
toms duty in China is so
high, iPs prohibitive. So
the more I see things on
the Net , the more upset
I become .
In the hype- ridden
People’s Republic of
China, 1996 was the
“Year of the Internet"
No matter that, by the
highest estimates, only
150,000 Chinese people
- barely 1 in 10,000 -
are actually wired* Or that most mainland Chinese
have never touched a computer, or that there are 17
people, on average, for every phone line. From Bei¬
jing in the north to Guangzhou near the border with
Hong Kong in the south, breathless news reports
insist that China's traditional greeting, uNi chifanle
ma ?” - Have you eaten? - is being replaced. Now any
forward-looking person asks, “M shangwangle maV:
Are you wired?
It's not just press hysteria: in Beijing, shiny new
computer monitors line the second floor of the famed
Foreign Languages Bookstore, pushing Chinese-
language versions of Eudora and the latest delights
of Netscape and Internet Explorer where the inter¬
minable works of Mao, Stalin, and Enver Hoxha
once held sway*
Earlier this year, the craze was modem introduc¬
tory offers - computer companies flogging hardware
and software packages from street stalls outside
WIRED JUNE 1997
H4e
Sculptors at Beijing's
Central Academy of Fine
Arts race to finish a memo¬
rial to paramount leader
Deng Xiaoping (left), who
died in February at 92,
The statue is due to be in
place at Shenzhen, near
the border with Hong Knng.
by July 1, in time for the
man most responsible for
China's Open Door policy to
watch the British colony's
return to the motherland.
[spark.
El
department stores- Bill Gates’s The Road Ahead has
sold more than 400,000 copies - pirated editions not
included. Even the massive billboards that line roads,
mark intersections, and clutter the countryside are
as likely now to feature Acer* Microsoft, or home¬
grown Beida Fangzheng computers as Shiseido cos¬
metics, XO cognac, or the Communist Party’s latest
propaganda.
But nothing seems to have loosened slogan writers’
pens quite like the Net itself:
Join the Internet chib; meet todays successful people;
experience the spirit of the age; drink deep of the cup
of leisure.
Buy Internet, use Internet. Get on board the ark to
the next century. Win the prize of the world.
Internet, the passport of the modem , civilized man .
Driving from the airport into Beijing in February, we
listened to a radio feature about the latest develop¬
ments in online technology
on the popular program
Good Morning Taxi! “The
Internet is not only about
information ” the report
concluded- “It’s about new
ways of thinking, new ways
of living.”
That, of course, is pre¬
cisely what worries China's
rulers. New ways of think¬
ing, of communicating,
of organizing people and
information - the Net
takes aim squarely at
things that since Mao’s
earliest days have been
the state’s exclusive
domain. For a country still
coming to grips with the
passing of its latest great
leader, Deng Xiaoping, it’s
a double shock of the new:
the technology that China needs to build the most
powerful country on earth in the 21st century could
also undermine the monolith state itself. Where the
quest by Deng’s successors to control the Net and its
consequences will lead, no one knows. But no one
doubts that the Net, that amorphous and unpredict¬
able messenger, holds out tantalizing possibilities for
a country so long turned in upon itself.
From his home in Beijing, one of China’s pioneer
telecommuters, Pan Jianxin, writes a widely read
computer column for the popular Guangzhou-based
weekend paper Southern Weekly:
Pm on the Net maybe four or five hours a day The
phone bills are murder and my wife complains , but
I can 't keep off it. The Net is a world unto itself
Sound familiar? He could be any Net columnist
anywhere. But this is China:
The general cultural level of the nation is woeful.
We're still trying to get people to stop spitting in public.
So the Net is not a main issue .
DEUS EX MACHINA
Neophilia is a double-edged sword that China has
eagerly grasped since the middle of the last century
In earlier eras, U was political revolution - including
“scientific” socialism - that promised a quick fix to
China’s problems. Today high technology is the deus
ex machina. The question on everyone’s mind - the
Chinese government and its critics alike - is whether
it will also be a cultural and political Trojan horse.
The latest tide of high tech adulation in China
started building in the early 1990s, often with a comic
tinge. First it was streets! de “computer fortune tell¬
ing,” then “computer diagnosis” - traditional Chinese
medicines mysteriously dosed out by machine. More
recent crazes - supported by the inevitable billboards
and hoardings - include “computer” car washing
(electronically controlled sprayers) and beauty salons
(automated facial analysis): not the stuff to cause
anyone to lose sleep at the Public Security Bureau,
The Net has been more problematic. As in most of
the world, scientists were Internet pioneers; the dif¬
ference is that, due to lack of interest and primitive
infrastructure, the first serious network wasn’t put
together until 1995- Two years later, the national uni¬
versity system followed, with what is still a cherished
innovation: email connections, both within the coun¬
try and to the outside world.
Then came a publicist’s dream that brought the
Net nationwide attention. Zhu Ling, a young science
student at Beijing’s elite Qinghua University, fell
mysteriously ill. As her condition deteriorated,
distraught friends appealed for help on the Net,
Thousands of responses flooded in from around the
world - 84 of which (according to more of those
breathless press accounts) correctly diagnosed thallo-
toxicosis, a rarely seen condition caused by exposure
to the element thallium, in her case during labora¬
tory experiments. Zhu Ling was treated and eventu¬
ally began a slow recovery ; the Chinese public was
enthralled. A television minis eries is reportedly in
the works.
That’s the dream. Here’s the reality: 86 percent
of China’s citizens have never touched a computer.
Only 1.6 percent of Chinese families own one, and
just 4.1 percent plan to buy. (The figures come from
the Yangshi Survey and Consulting Service Center,
a Beijing marketing firm.) Of course, that still means
10 or 20 million potential sales, which is why US and
European computer companies don’t do too much
complaining about Chinese Net freedoms.
University students are encouraged to use email
to plan study overseas, but only a small number of
graduate students and faculty, mainly in technical
disciplines, enjoy real access to the Web. Most
mainland Chinese - say, a billion or so people -
wouldn’t know the difference between the Internet
Opposite (clockwise, from
top left); middle-aged Mao¬
ists sing Communist Party
songs in Beijing's Dongdan
Park; China InfoHighway
managing director Zhang
Shuxtii, the woman who
would he Chino's Bill Gates,
in her company's server
room; consumerism hits
a tiny Shanghai apartment;
Beijing's Sparkicc Internet
Cafe; the lady who mops
the enlryway a! Shenzhen's
International Electronics
City; Unix programmer Lao
Ma relaxes in his Beijing
apartment with a copy of
Nicholas Negropoife's
Being Digital an the table.
We listened to a
report on a popular
Beijing radio show.
The Internet, the
show concluded,
"is about new
ways of thinking,
new ways of living.”
That, of course,
is precisely
what worries
China's rulers.
WIRED JUNE 1997
Join the Internet club; meet
today's successful people;
experience the spirit of the age
Buy Internet, use Internet.
Get on board the ark to the
next century,"
Internet, the passport of the
modern, civilized man."
Lilli - lEflsaltt
Iki - promotional slogans for
Chinese modems and Internet
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China's tide of high tech adulation started
in the early 1990s, often with a comic tinge.
First it was streetside 'computer fortune-
telling," then "computerized" medical diag¬
nosis, car washes, and beauty salons.
Today, whole electronics districts have
sprouted, including Beijing's Zhongguancun
and Shanghai's Putuo, featuring storefront
computer shops, swap meets, and alleys
lined with buy-and-sell ads. Internet cafes
are a minigrowth industry. And the latest fad
is ISPs - at last count Beijing alone had 32,
all vying for customers.
The ISPs have their work cut out for them:
86 percent of China's citizens have never
touched a computer. Only 1.6 percent of Chi¬
nese families own one, just 4.1 percent plan
to buy. Most mainland Chinese - say, a billion
or so people - wouldn't know the difference
between the Internet and "The Internationale,'
the Communist Party theme sang.
j 1 |^| i |
«
/]
X
and “The Internationale,” the Communist Party
theme song*
But however small the numbers, for the Chinese
government's control freaks - and that means basic¬
ally everyone in authority - free-flowing information
and unauthorized association are profoundly disturb¬
ing concepts* The Communist movement itself was
born in China of surreptitious gatherings, cell meet¬
ings In gloomy garrets, and covert exchanges of infor¬
mation - plus a large dose of mass dissatisfaction and
oppression* Mention information revolution, and the
instinctive overreaction is to clamp down.
State Council Order No. 195 is titled “Temporary
Regulations Governing Computer Information
Networks and the Internet ” Signed by Premier Li
Peng on February 1, 1996, the law contains the
following gems:
The State is in charge of overall planning, national
standardization, graded
control, and the develop¬
ment of all areas related
to the Internet.
Any direct connection
with the Internet must be
channeled via international
ports established and main¬
tained by the Ministry of
Post and Telecommunication.
No group or individual
may establish or utilize
any other means to gain
Internet access .
All organizations and
individuals must obey the
respective state laws and
administrative regulations
and carry out rigorously
the system of protecting
state secrets . Under no cir¬
cumstances should the
Internet be used to endan¬
ger national security or betray state secrets .
SPIRITUAL POLLUTION CONTROL
In an equipment-crowded office in the Air Force
Guesthouse on Beijing's Third Ring Road sits the man
in charge of computer and Net surveillance at the
Public Security Bureau. The PSB - leva, or “thunder
makers ” in local dialect - covers not only robberies
and murder, hut also cultural espionage, “spiritual
pollutants” and all manner of dissent* Its new con¬
cern ts Internet malfeasance.
A computer engineer in his late 30s, Comrade X
(he asked not to be identified because of his less-
than-polite comments about some Chinese ISPs) is
overseeing efforts to build a digital equivalent to
China's Great Wall. Under construction since last
year, what’s officially known as the “firewall” Is
designed to keep Chinese cyberspace free of pollu¬
tants of all sorts, by the simple means of requiring
China today is a jarring
clash of old and new ways:
cellular phonos and ancient
games, antique habits and
Infomet cafes, rice bowls
and McDonald's*
What started 20 years op
with Deng's Open Door has
bad momentous, mostly
uncalculated consequences,
People are tuning out Mao
suits, ration books, and state
TV, and tuning in foreign
fashions, credit cards, even
surreptitious news slipped
in over the Net But that
does not mean that the
China of the future is going
to look more like us. It is
going to look like China.
ISPs to block access to “problem” sites abroad.
Comrade X explains: “The first line of defense is
what we call ‘preventative interference,’ based on
selected keywords. What we're particularly concerned
about is material aimed at undermining the unity and
sovereignty of China (that is, references to Tibetan
independence and the Taiwan question), attempts to
propagate new7 religions like the Children of God, and
dissident publications. Commonplace ideological dif¬
ferences of opinion are now generally ignored ”
IPs no great technical trick, especially since con¬
nections to the outside world are required to pass
through a handful of official gateways - the PTTs
ChinaNet and the Ministry of Electronics's “Golden
Bridge” are two of the biggest - which do their own
filtering up-front. Among the things they block, depend¬
ing on circumstances, are most of the Western media,
as well as the China News Digest - a sprawling online
service run by Chinese exiles - and other specialized
sites and newsgroups operated from abroad. Eager
for a slice of the action, the major global networking
companies - Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, and
Ray Networks, among others - cheerfully compete to
supply the gear that makes it possible*
But as Comrade X also notes, it’s not jnst a matter
of technology:
Na turally many questionable sites still go undetected *
So the way we prefer to control things is through a
decentralized responsibility system: the user, the ISP,
and China Telecom are all held responsible for the
information users gain access to.
People are used to being wary ; and the general sense
that you are under surveillance acts as a disincentive *
The key to con trolling the Net in China is in managing
people, and this is a process that begins the moment
you purchase a modem *
“All organizations
and individuals
must vigorously
carry out the system
of protecting state
secrets. Under no
circumstances
should the Internet
be used to endanger
national security or
betray state secrets."
JUST SIGN HERE
So you want to get wired in the People's Republic?
Let's recap the simple steps to get online:
First, pick an ISP - there were 32 in Beijing at last
count, ranging from government-run companies and
China Telecom to ambitious private start-ups like
China InfoHighway* You fill out some papers and pro¬
vide an ID card (or, for foreigners, a passport)* The
initial Police File Report Form has to be filled out in
triplicate - a copy for your ISP, one for the local PSB,
the third for the provincial-level PSB Computer
Security and Supervision Office*
Next there's the Net Access Responsibility Agree¬
ment, in which you pledge not to use the internet to
threaten state security or reveal state secrets* You also
swear not to read, reproduce, or transmit material
that “endangers the state, obstructs public safety, or
is obscene or pornographic”
Finally, there’s an application lor the ISP itself -
where you live and work, your profession, your home
and office phone numbers, your mobile phone, and
even your pager. Plus details about your computer
equipment, the modem type, and, oh yes, its permit
number* Back to our friends at the PSB for that*
Q4Q
WIRED JUNE 1997
As we stand on the cusp
of the new century, we need
to challenge America's
dominant position.
In the 21st century, the
boundaries will be redrawn
The world is no longer the
spiritual colony of America
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China is embarked on what
seal economists call the
acquisition of primitive
capital." Individuals,
companies, and state
enterprises are vying for
advantage in the rough-
and-ready atmosphere of
a virtually unique historical
moment: simultaneous
industrial and information
revolutions in the world's
oldest, most populous nation.
Clockwise Irom opposite
top left: shoppers in
Guangzhou; investors crowd
Shanghai's stock exchange:
new buildings go up; old
ones wait for demolition;
foreign heroes; a Beijing
student monitors her peers.
Now you’re getting close to that “passport of the
modern, civilized man ” But yon still have to pay.
That means either a check or a hank account name
and number - credit cards are not welcome. Figure a
monthly net-plus-phone bill of Y350 (US$42) - roughly
half a recent college graduate’s monthly salary. Some¬
one with a good job at a foreign corporation in Beijing
or Shanghai can probably manage it. And so, of course,
can the media-starved expatriates they work for. As
Comrade X remarked about the system’s launch last
year, “It was a real thrill to see all the foreigners lin¬
ing up outside our office to be registered”
THE ECSTASY OF COMMUNICATION
Here’s how Sparkice, a Sino-Canadian joint venture,
promotes its new Internet Cafe in Beijing, the largest
in the city since it opened in November:
Under the searchlight of history', on the cusp of the
new century, a brightly lit Great Wall is spreading
rapidly out of China toward the rest of the world .
Its light conveys a message of a holy duty: Sparkice
is building a multimedia platform that will surprise
the globe ,
Internet caf6s are one of China’s minigrowth indus¬
tries. They combine sought-after “imported” atmos¬
phere with basic online services - “the ecstasy of
communication,” as one flyer puts it. There’s a cluster
of modest operations - the Papillon Music Internet
Cafe is one - near Beijing University’s main entrance,
next to Zhongguancun, the city’s electronics district.
Some have only a single computer and, judging from
the Papillon, wrarm service but weak coffee and a seri¬
ous blight of plastic foliage.
Sparkice, next to the Capital Stadium’s west entrance,
has higher aspirations - it includes its own ISP, for
starters. The stadium itself is worth a visit: a major
sports venue during the Cultural Revolution, it is now
an oversized furniture display hall. The cafe, for its
part, is done in the latest international techno style -
glitzy ambient lighting, 10 shiny new computers, and
TVs beaming in the latest NBA games.
But “Chinese characteristics,” as Comrade X would
call them, are right there, too. .Anyone is welcome
to order a cappuccino, but going online requires you
to run the same bureaucratic maze as getting wired at
home: Police File Report Form, Net Access Responsi¬
bility Agreement, and ISP contract Plus an ID card
or passport num ber, and the details of where you live
and work.
Then there arc the rules: no attempts to visit for¬
bidden sites, of course, or to download inappropriate
material. No changing machines during a session.
Only one person online at a time. And the logs of your
activities may be checked. “If anything out of the ordi¬
nary is discovered” says the contract, “you will be fined
accordingly” - up to 10 times the cost of your time
online. For serious breaches, the waitpersons-cum-Net
police are authorized to hand you over to the author¬
ities. Happy surfing - or, as they say in Mandarin,
manyou , “roaming at will ” At 14.4 Kbps, 174 ►
HANDS OFF HONG KONG
CHINA'S LEADERS SAY OPEN INTERNET
BUT FREE-SPEECH ADVOCATES AND A
BY LOUISE NAMETH n onald Tu was crossing
U one of Hong Kong's
busiest streets when his
cell phone rang. It was
Hongkong Telecom IMS, his
internet service provide r,
complaining about the con¬
tent of his homepage and
stating that they would
remove the Web site if he
didn't. Donald's Page
(www.hkstud.com/), as Tu's
site is called, features sev¬
eral nude photographs of
the gay Hong Kong disc
jockey, with his black-and-
white baby photos as a back¬
drop. Full frontal nudity is
obscured. But by the time
Writer Louise Nameth
(b1uestar12@aol.comJ cov¬
ers finance and technology
from New Vbrfr,
Tu got home, his homepage
was gone.
Tu had been signed up
with another ISP, HKNet,
which briefly removed his
homepage "for review."
Later, he received an email
from HKNet requesting that
he permanently take down
the site. Fed up, he then
transferred his homepage
to an American ISP. "I don't
need the hassle/' he says,
"particularly when the
dinosaurs come."
While some fear that a
dampdown on electronic
rights could hit Hong Kong
when the British crown
colony reverts to the
People's Republic of China
on July 1, people like Tu
know that the whiff of cen¬
sorship is already in the air.
They have seen at least one
sobering example of how
easily local police can halt
Internet access. In March
1995, Hong Kong police
raided all but one of the
local ISPs offering dialup
service, confiscating PC
equipment and records and
shutting down the access
providers for a week.
Although the raids were
ostensibly launched to
crack down on hackers, the
only ISPs to get hit were
those that had resisted a
new surcharge on Internet
usage. It was the govern¬
ment's way of reminding
them who was boss. With
local law enforcement this
draconian, residents won¬
der what's in store under
mainland rule.
A continuation of such
raids could have severe
repercussions for the sub¬
tropical island's business
community, which has long
thrived on unfettered capi¬
talism. Hong Kong is best
known for its ability to
make money, thanks to a
large harbor, a network of
powerful banks, and a
HK$2.86 trillion (US$370
billion) stock market that Is
more than three times the
size of China's. Many con¬
sider the city to be China's
Wall Street; one-third of
direct-investment funds
flowing into the mainland
last year came through
Hong Kong. Nearly half a
million companies are reg¬
istered there, including
500 forelgn-owned banks.
WIRED JUNE 1997
“Hong Kong, the Motherland
Welcomes You."
This is the message on the
blackboard at the Hongmiao
Elementary School in Beijing.
One student wrote to his
cross-border counterparts:
"After a century of hard times,
Hong Kong will finally return
to the motherland's embrace.
Do you know about the
motherland? Led by President
Jiang Zemin, it is developing
rapidly. Unfortunately, our
dear Grandpa Deng Xiaoping
passed away before he could
see the handover."
ACCESS WILL REMAIN AFTER THE JULY 1 TAKEOVER OF THE BRITISH CROWN COLONY.
NERVOUS BUSINESS COMMUNITY CLAIM THAT A CRACKDOWN HAS ALREADY BEGUN.
In 1 995, merchandise trade
accounted for HK$2.8 tril¬
lion (US$367 billion); the
service industry alone is a
HK$457 billion (US$59 bil¬
lion) annual business. And
they're a heavily wired
bunch. Hong Kong has
spawned more than 90
ISPs - about half of which
remain active - ranging
from one-person servers
to powerhouse telcos like
Hongkong Telecom. An
estimated 300,000 people
have Internet access.
Officially, the ruling
British government has said
that Hong Kong would con¬
tinue to operate under
existing laws when the
Chinese flag is raised over
the city this summer. The
plan, which was reached
under an agreement with
the United Kingdom in
1984, calls for making Hong
Kong a "special administra¬
tive region" within China
and leaving Hong Kong's
legal systems in place.
Nothing is supposed to
change. "Hong Kong is too
important to the Chinese
for them to interfere/' says
Michael Wu, deputy chair
and COO of the Hong Kong
Securities & Futures
Commission.
Free-speech advocates
are not so sure. China has
long tried to suppress the
open exchange of informa¬
tion and has been particu¬
larly tough on those who
attempt to build an elec¬
tronic bridge to the outside
world. China's rhetoric
about "one country, two
systems," for instance, pro¬
vides little comfort to local
legislator Emily Lau, leader
of the prodemocracy
Frontier Party. "We don't
rule anything out/' Lau
says. "I cannot say that
China will definitely damp
down, but that is the fear of
many within the Internet
community. China is intoler¬
ant of free expression, par¬
ticularly if it's critical of the
government."
C. H. Tung, the Hong
Kong government's newly
appointed head, has said
that individual rights should
be subject to the will of the
people.Tung has also indi¬
cated that making deroga¬
tory remarks about Chinese
leaders after the transition
may be illegal, and he has
moved to replace the
colony's legislature with
one consisting of Beijing-
approved representatives.
In addition, China will inval¬
idate parts of a Hong Kong
Bill of Rights passed six
years ago. The new govern¬
ment has announced plans
to repeal or amend 25 exist¬
ing laws, including many
pertaining to civil liberties.
Permission to demonstrate,
for example, soon must be
requested one week in
advance, and all meetings
of 20 or more people will
have to be registered with
the government, The
changes also tighten con¬
trols on links to foreign
organizations and will
weaken privacy rights, isz »
Officially, the Chinese
government vows that
the status quo will
remain. But "one country,
two systems" rhetoric
offers little comfort to
local legislator Emily
Lau. "We don't rule
anything out," she says.
DsD
SIGGRAPH 97: the world's most diverse
computer community convenes in the planet's most
cosmopolitan city.
http : //www. s i g g ra p h . org /s97/
For more information:: SIGGRAPH 97 Conference Management / Smith, Beckfin & Associates., Inc. / 401 North Michigan Avenue / Chicago, Illinois 6061 1 USA
+ 1 3 1 2 32 1 ,6830 / + 1.31 2.321 .6876 fax / siggraph97@siggraph.org
Sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH
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C R E D
STREET
Listen Hear
All ! wart is to have my
PC type as I speak. Today
three programs - made by
Dragon Systems, Kurzweil,
and IBM - promise just that.
After trying each one, I frnd
they're all at a loss for words.
Dragon's Dictate software
is easiest to use and the most
accurate. Dragon has a good
reputation among disabled
students, lawyers, and jour¬
nalists: put a microphone In
front of a Windows- based
computer, and you can use
it without touching the key¬
board. The deluxe US$1 ,695
DragonDictate, which rec¬
ognizes 60,000 words, isn't
cheap; more modest versions
include a 10,000- word model
for $99. You'll find yourself
spelling out perhaps 10 per-
Talk to typo.
cent of the words you use
daily. Fortunately, you only
have to spell them out once.
The system understands
grammar, so it recognizes the
difference between 'Please
turn right" and "Please write
your name." When it goofs
up, you either add the word
to its vocabulary or speak
more clearly, A quiet room
is a necessity,
I've used Dragon success¬
fully for hour-long chat ses¬
sions, but for writing email,
I still find it easier to type and
take frequent breaks,
- Simson Garfmkel
DragonDktate 2S2\ US$99,
$395, $695, or $1,695. Dragon
Systems: +1 (617) 965 5200.
Breeding the Machine
Darwin Among the Machines is not your usual cutting-edge book
about self-organising systems, parallel processing, anti artificial
life. Author George Dyson covers those topics, and covers them well,
but through the eyes of people who have never heard of chaos theory,
die Santa Fe Institute, or the MIT Media Lab.
This book’s heroes are great thinkers of history like Leibniz, Hooke,
and Darwin - not Charles, but his grandfather Erasmus, who wrote in
1794 that “the world itself might have been generated, rather than cre¬
ated; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small
beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles.”
Another typical protagonist is Lewis Fry Richardson, who proposed
using 64,000 computers concurrently to predict the weather. Richard¬
son made his proposal in 1917, at a time when a “computer” was a
person with a pencil. His 0.0000001- megahertz clock was a human
conductor with a baton, and his packet-switched communication sys¬
tem involved passing around slips of paper.
The startling relationship between nature and machines.
tal communications system, based on optical technology, that spanned
Europe in the 18th century? YouTl have to read the book to get the
details, but Til give you a hint: it worked at the rate of about two signals
per minute.
The book is full of historical anecdotes, and Dyson tells them weli But
this is much more than a history book. The author weaves his threads
together for a purpose. Using voices of the past and present, he describes
a fresh and sometimes startling viewpoint of the emerging relationship
between nature and machines. From vignettes about Olaf Stapledon,
George Boole, John von Neumann, and Samuel Butler, a larger story
develops in which the twin processes of intelligence and evolution
are inseparably intertwined. As Dyson explains in the preface, “In the
game of life and evolution, there are three players at the table: human
beings, nature, and machine. I am firmly on the side of nature. But
nature, I suspect, is on the side of machines.” - Danny Hillis
Darwin Among the Machines, by George Dyson: US$25. Addison Wesley Longman: +1 (617)
944 3700.
□ 5 □
WIRED
JUNE
19 9 7
Rocket Jockey
Speed and destruction
alone can't guarantee an
engaging computer gaming
experience. Sure, once it may
have been fun to blast away
at the enemy like an idiot. But
collective tastes have matured,
and the rabid legEon of joy-
stick-gripping gorehounds
demands a more refined
brand of mayhem. For such
connoisseurs, I recommend
Rocket Jockey.
A wicked sense of humor
and speed -demon action
come together in a game
as inventive as it is addictive.
The setting: a gladiator-style
arena where jockeys go head-
to-head astride rockets. These
sporty blasters - a curious
blend of '50s hot rod and 21st-
centuryjet- look like low-
fi flaming find.
wheels. The only way to effec¬
tively control one is to launch
grappling hooks at pylons
scattered throughout the
arena - these killer cables add
a dimension of challenge and
strategy that's usually missing
in racing games. Once secured,
a cable will wing the rocket
around in a seriously fast one-
eighty. The same cables can
be used to clothesline your
opponents and latch them
onto exploding balls.
Networkable for up to six
players, Rocket Jockey is an all-
out free-for-all. This is the kind
of maniacal fun you can't have
In real life - at least as a law-
abiding citizen. - Scott Taves
Rocket Jockey for Windows
95: US$29.99, Segasoft:
+1 (41 5} 802 4400, on the
Web at wwivsega5ott.com/.
McLuhan Lives
The Video McLuhan is an adroitly edited, six-video collection of Mar¬
shall McLuhan’s public pronouncements, entertainingly anchored by
Tom Wolfe, McLuhan was a fabulous trickster, and in these tapes his tal¬
ent for putting on an audience is fully visible. Many segments are from
vintage television talk shows, and it is as interesting to note the wander¬
ing pedantic, nicotine-addled style of this once-gentle genre as it is to
watch McLuhan explain the disappearance of the unconscious amid
choking clouds of cigarette smoke,
McLuhan is often intentionally oblivious to points his interviewers
are trying to make, and we frequently find ourselves bobbing help¬
lessly in a stream of references and definitions. Through it all, how¬
ever, the professor brings a loquacious integrity to his style and his
discoveries. Part of the fun is watching him resist the blandishments
of various luminaries as they try to water down his message. When
Tom Snyder challenges him at one point to explain why he is so hard
to understand, McLuhan tells him straight out that it is because people
Two decades of McLuhan's public pronouncements captured on VMS.
are not accustomed to using their wits.
Wolfe vigilantly follows the shifts in McLuhan's thinking through
the 3 60s and 70s and gives advance warning about whal to look for
in the interviews. Still, frequent use of the rewind button is required.
McLuhan constantly changes gears, alternating between exhortations
to appreciate the profound shift in human culture caused hy electronic
media and statements of his opposition to this shift. The tapes pre¬
sent an especially good portrait nf McLuhan’s intellectual influences:
his Catholicism, his mysticism, and his strange brand of conservatism.
My Favorite quote: “I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change.
Bull am determined to understand what is happening, because 1 don't
choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me.”
The Video McLuhan is guaranteed to become a hardy perennial of
media studies syllabi, and at US55595 for the series, the best place to
watch it will be at the library. - Gary Wolf
The Video McLuhan: US$595. Video McLuhan Inc.: +1 (416) 484 6378, on the Web at
www. videamduhan.com.
Films on Fire
For American devotees of Hong Kong action films,
1996 will be remembered as the year the ingenuity
and breakneck kinetics of this genre stormed the
Western world. Among other notable inroads, Jackie
Chan broke through as a Hollywood star, and Broken
Arrow vaulted director John Woo to A-list status.
Sex and Zen & a Bullet in the Head , the first attempt
by a major US publisher to map this phenomenon,
was released only months before China's takeover
of the British crown colony - which leaves the fate
of Hong Kong's film industry, like the city itself, on
uncertain ground. The book is a solid introduction
for the novice viewer and a worthwhile addition to
the tlnemaphile's library.
Truth be told, Hong Kong movies have suffered a
troubling downturn in recent years, partly due to the
diaspora of capital and creativity before zero hour.
Appropriately, Sex and Zen is a requiem to the genre's
golden era, from the mid-'80$ to the early '90s, when
the industry regularly created films of such wild bril¬
liance that they made Hollywood fare look comatose.
Authors Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins offer
chapters on Chan, Woo, and up-and-comers like mas-
"Damn. HI burn you into a BBQ chicken!"
ter fantasist Tsui Hark and street-level auteur Ringo
Lam - plus sections devoted to the martial arts, noir,
and fantasy/horror subgenres, among others. These
consist primarily of reviews of the best films in each
category - although, too often, they are not so much
reviews as exhaustive plot synopses. The book shines
most in its entertaining sidebars, which include a
collection of those deliciously bizarre English sub¬
titles. (My favorite: "Damn, HI bum you into a BBQ
chicken!") And there's also a helpful compendium of
related online and offline resources.
While many Hong Kong luminaries have already
taken their talents to the West, the promise of a new
billion-strong audience and the innovative work of
such resolutely native filmmakers as Chungking
Express director Wong Kar-wai may yet lure them
back for a creative revival. Until then, Sex and Zen &
a Bulletin the Head is a vivid reminder of the years
when these filmmakers forever changed the way we
look at movies. - Wagner James Au
Sex and Zen & a Bullet in the Head . The Essential Guide to Hong
Kong's Mind-Bending Films , by Stefan Hammond and Mrke
Wilkins: US$12. Fireside Books: +1 (212) 698 7076,
WIRED JUNE 1997
use
Amped
Ofd- fashioned vacuum
tubes have found their
way back into hi-fi designs -
mostly in power amps. But
these tubes have a lot going
agarnst them. Because this
gear remains the province
of audiophiles, prices can be
stratospheric Tubes tun hot,
deteriorate with age, and
need to be replaced every
two to four years. And the
amps usually can't match
the stomach-punching bass
of solid-state gear.
Mesa's Baron stereo tube
amp overcomes two of these
drawbacks. Granted, the Baron
is quite a little space heater,
and yes, you'll have to drop
200 clams on fresh glassware
every few years. But when II
paired it with Gallo Nucleus
speakers, I hit pay dirt.
Boss bass.
Baron's rich mid band clarity
and the three-dimensionality
of its sound border on virtual
reality. The sizzle of cymbals
and transient snap of sticks
hitting drums are startling in
their accuracy and effortless¬
ness. More surprisingly, this
tube amp knows how to rock.
The buHt-Hke-a-tank Baron
took all the deep-bass abuse
I could throw at it.
Knobs and switches let
you alter the sonic character.
What you get is really several
amps in one. This is literally
true - these retro Siamese
twins carry a separate power
supply for the left and right
channels (and two power
cords!). - Rogier van Bakel
Mesa Baron amplifier:
US$3,695. Mesa Engineering:
+1 (707) 778 9505,
In the Bag
After a grueling day of reporting breaking news, the last thing I want
to do is drive down to the grocery store to shop. So instead I fire up
Netscape, jump to Shoppers Express ( www.shopx.com/) , and order in.
Shoppers Express is an electronic shopping sendee that, in partner¬
ship with local stores, delivers groceries to your doorstep. So far it cov¬
ers only Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas, but more cities are expected
to come online soon. The company claims to offer anything available in
participating stores, and after perusing its list, I don't doubt it. Who
knew there were so many brands of toilet paper? Or adult diapers?
The service promises the same national brands, the same In-store
prices, and the same weekly specials as big grocery store chains like
Pavilions. Now, I can look for items by name or by category. Typing
in “apple” brings up a choice of three dozen varieties, from Braetmm to
York, I order a couple of pounds of Granny Smiths, extra large. 1 con¬
tinue browsing, clicking on items and adding them to my list - Ajax,
brown eggs, mineral water, toilet paper, and Haagen-Dazs fat-free
chocolate sorbet bars. Pm creating a master list - things YU need to
reorder each time I log on. I can choose to let Shoppers Express sub-
inconvenience shopping.
sdtute a like item if the store is out of stock.
Not everything works just yet. But if you have Netscape 3.0, you can
click on some items and see a picture and nutritional information. When
you check out, there’s space for special instructions - how thinly sliced
you want your cold cuts, howT ripe you like your fruit.
You can pay by credit card or check; I opt Iot check and enter my dri¬
vers license number. I receive an immediate email confirmation and
wait 48 hours for my order. Good thing Fm not relying on this service
for anything too important.
Two days later, after work, I pull into my driveway 15 minutes early
for my grocery appointment, and the Shoppers Express guy is waiting
for ine. I tip him US$3 on top of the $9,95 delivery fee, making this a
very expensive way to shop - at least for small orders. As I unload the
bags, I see - or rather, feel - that the sorbet bars have melted. But the
eggs are unbroken, the apples just right,
I call an 800 number about the Haagen-Dazs liquefaction and sun
promised a refund check by mail. That will be nice, I think, as I slurp
down my melted fat-free - and now cost-free - chocolate bars.
- Chris Rubin
Shoppers Express: U5$9.95 for grocery delivery, (800) 524 8264, on the Web at www.shopx.com/.
Come Talk to Peter
Unlike XphraT, Peter Gabriel's breakthrough
1994 CD-ROM, his latest creation is about nei¬
ther Gabriel nor his Real World Records label. £Ve,
a multilayered gaming experience, explores the
nature of relationships, with music as an integral
part of the process. You don't just remix music or
look in drawers; you immerse yourself in the erotic
realms of love, sex, and romance.
Gabriel has crafted an impressive production,
with high-end music mixed on the fly, high-speed
scaling animation, and the gorgeous original art
of Helen Chadwick, Yayoi Kusama, Cathy de Mon-
chaux, and Nils Udo. The CD-ROM begins - like life
itself - with sperm and ovum. You fertilize the
egg to enter the game and embark on a quest to
reunite the first samplers of sin, Adam and Eve.
Even more true to life. Eve has countless rules that
no one explains and that change with unsettling
frequency. Sounds, employed as dues throughout.
Lost: Adam. If seen, please return to Garden of Eden.
signal whether you're headed in the right direction.
Traversing four worlds, each built around graphic
art and a song written by Gabriel, you encounter
rooms peopled by scientists and everyday folks. You
advance by listening to their brief speeches. Using
some of the hems picked up along the way, you can
remix Gabriel's songs. What's unusual - and enticing
for fans - is the inclusion of previously unreleased
instrumental and vocal tracks, so your mix can be
wildly different from anything heard before.
The search to reunite Adam (often portrayed by
Gabriel) with his other half moves from worlds of
mud to foliage to industrial to postapocatypse in
hit-and-miss fashion. Constant effort is required to
find the buttons that take you somewhere. But for
the visually rich design and the ability to hear and
create different mixes of favorite Gabriel songs, it's
a journey well worth taking. - Chris Rubin
Eve CD-ROM: US$39.95. Radio Real World: on the Web at
www. red world on. net/eve.
□ sS
WIRED JUNE 1997
INTERCOMMUNICATION CENTER
©NTT
Exploring the Future of the Imagination
NTT Intercommunication Center
Tod ay s electronic information re volu¬
tion is effecting a great tranformation
i n h ow peop le comm un i cate. Foe using
on electronic communication, the NTT
Intercommunication Center (ICC) is
dedicated to envisioning a future soci¬
ety rich in imagination and creativity
through dialogue among science, tech¬
nology, art and culture.
EXHIBITION
Opening Exhibition:
The Mirage City,f
Another Utopia
Date: Apri l 19 - July 13. 1997
The exhibition will be an experimental model for con¬
ceptual teation and realization of a Utopian city for the
21st century, planned and proposed by Arata isozaki, an
architect, on the occasion of the opening of ICC.
http:// www. ntticc. or. jp/speciaV'utopiB
The ICG’s, Permanent Exhibition features ten works by
media artists from Japan and abroad. The ICC provides
encounters with media environments to be found In no
other museum. One work employs a CAVE three-
dimensional virtual reality system, and with another,
visitors can experience an anechoic chamber.
fWAl Toehio (Japan). Karl SIMS(United States),
MIKAMI Seiko(Japan), Ulrike GABRIEL (Germany) „
Gregory BARSAMI AM (United States), Dumb Type
(Japan), Heri Dono (Indonesia) , Christa SOM MERER
(Austria) + Laurent MlGNONMEAU (France), TOWATA
Ma&ayuki + MAJSUMOTO Vasuakl (Japan), Agnes
HEGEDUS (Hungary) + Jeffrey SHAW (Austral! a) +
Bernd L1NTERMANN (Germany ) + Leslie STUCK
(United States)
WORKSHOP
The Trace of Toshio IwaS s Media Art
Open Studio
Date: April 19 June 22, 1997
The exhibition traces the trajectory of Iwai Toshio's
media art works from Ms earliest period through the
present, showing how his unique interfacing Of image,
sound and human being has sustained the creation of a
new audio- video-sensory world.
GUIDE
* Hours; 10:00am - 6:00 pm Friday until 9:00 pm
i No admission within 30 minutes of closing)
* Closed: Mondays (It Monday is a holiday, then Tuesday)
* Information: tel +81-3-5353-0000
e-mail query @nttfcc. or. jp URL http: //ww w. ntticc. or. jp
NTT Intercommunication Center [ICC]
Tokyo Opera City Tower 4F- 3-20-2 Nishl-Shinjuku,
Shinjuku -ku, Tokyo 163-14, Japan
—
Sherlock Holmes is best known
for employing his powers of deduc¬
tive reasoning to combat crime. In The
Strange Case of Mrs. Hudson's Cat, a book that
updates Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's sleuth,
author Colin Bruce presses Holmes into ser-
vice to solve some of physics's most vexing
problems, such as elastic space-time and
quantum theory, Think of it as science made
fun and, um, elementary. Release: Jane.
Addison Wesley Longman: + 1 (212) 463 8440,
U U Net Technologies, the nationwide ISP,
plans to spend an unprecedented US$300 million to
build a network backbone running at OC-12 (622 Mbps).
The move is all the more impressive because its giant
parent corporation, MF5 WorldCom, already owns all of
the components of a complete public communications
network. Release: Summer UUNet: + J (703) 206 5888
Do browser wars mat¬
ter in the age of ubiquitous push
media? You bet. Netscape and Micro¬
soft are readying the next iterations
of their popular software, and the
battles for the best email, groupware
manager, and tuner are just heating
up. Release: Summer Microsoft: + f (206)
882 8080, Netscape: + 1 (415) 254 1900.
The star of the popular USA
Network show Duckman is
featured in a forthcoming PC
CD-ROM game. Help the sassy
and sarcastic hero outwit his
archnemesis, King Chicken, by
guiding Duckman through a suc¬
cession of perplexing puzzles.
Release: June. Playmates Interactive
Entertainment: + J (714) 428 2100.
Voice Pilot Technologies is ramping up
production of a totally hands-free speech-recogni¬
tion IRC chat client. Just log on, go to your favorite
online hangout, and start yapping out loud. Voice
Pilot Deluxe does the typing. It even translates
between Spanish and English on the fly. Release:
June . Voure Pilot Technologies:*} (305) 828 5600.
Someone at
NASA has a sense of humor. The
Mars-bound Pathfinder is due
to touch down on the Red Planet
on July 4. Once the craft's sur¬
face rover starts sending back
data, werll finally be able to
analyze the machinations of
those evil Martian microbes.
Release: July. Pathfinder; on the
Web at mpfwww.jjpJ.nasa.gov
/mpf/news.htmi.
—
When Dow Jones & Company instituted a subscription fee for The
Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition , many new-media savants pre¬
dicted its patrons would jump ship in favor of sites that offer free
business content. Six months later, more than 70,000 people are
ponying up US$49 a year for access to wsj.com (reduced to $29 for
subscribers to the analog edition).
Building on that success, Dow Jones is nearing completion of a
comprehensive Internet strategy. The company plans to develop a
push-and-pull news service from its existing Dow Jones Publications
Library, which contains more than 65 million articles from 3,600 pub¬
lications. This summer, online subscribers will be able to search, sort,
and retrieve articles from the complete archives on the Web. And a
wire service called CustomClips will scan the library and deliver news
direct to the desktop.
"Search engines cull the equivalent of 18 months of junk mail.
There's some value to it, but it's hardly something a professional
would pay for," says editor of online services Tim Andrews, "Quality
content has real value, and the lesson learned from wsj.com is that
more value deserves a corresponding higher price point."
While it's easy to bemoan the xenophobia typical of big-media
forays into interactive publishing, Dow Jones has an instructive track
record of pioneering information systems - a vaunted tradition that
dates back to the 1 890s, when the Dow Jones News Service began
pushing electronic news and stock quotes in the form of ticker tape
over telegraph wires.
Many experts have predicted a shakeout in the Web content busi¬
ness, a piece of punditry that might be dismissed as fearmongering
by entrenched old-media interests or embraced as sound business
advice. Whatever. Having dabbled in new media for the past 100
years, Dow Jones has learned what the suits are willing to pay for.
Which, if for no other reason than that, makes the company's moves
worth watching. - Jesse Freund
Release: Summer, Dow Jones Interactive Publishing: on the Web at bjs.dowjones.com/.
f
050
JfiesF
WIRED
mi
JUNE
19 9 7
Tarika
Son Egaf
Xenaphile
In the face of a truth-averse regime, Madagascar's
premier roots group offers a subversive dose of
veracity. At Tarika's core lie sinuous, intricate mel¬
odies from an ensemble of strings whose Malagasy
names (vatiha, marovany, jejy voatavo , kabosy) belie
teasingly familiar evocations of mandolin, zither,
and dulcimer. Conversely, a light-fingered virtuosity
transforms violin, guitar, and electric bass into indis¬
putably indigenous instruments. Above the strings,
exquisite polyphonies sweep from strident to lush
and hint broadly at Malagasy culture's ancient links
to Indonesia. Supple lead vocals - especially from
Tarika's guiding spirit, Hanitra - anchor this har¬
monic intensity, while burbling rhythms propel it
irresistibly forward.
Tarika's exuberance, however, arrives on a grim
anniversary: 50 years ago, French colonists brutally
quelled a Malagasy uprising with troops imported
from France's other African possessions. Descendants
of these soldiers, known as "Senegalese" for where
they trained, live in Madagascar still, demonized
by officially sanctioned racism and ignorance. While
there's a cruel logic to scapegoating today's Sene¬
galese, there's little sense in the government's intent
to erase 194 7's bloody events from the country's
memory. Tarika ensures that won't happen: through¬
out Son Egal, the group maintains a sensitive bal¬
ance between celebratory sound and heartrending
epiphany.
From the elegiac "Sonegaly" to the upbeat "Disc
Be," several tracks relate Hanitra's search through
remote villages, crumbling archives, and the Inter¬
net for records or witnesses of those nearly forgot¬
ten horrors. Such harrowing revelations could be
corrosive when wielded by less artful historians, but
Tarika makes of them a bracing tonic, folding them
into an optimistic aural blend, its therapeutic mis¬
sion underscored by the presence of Senegalese
musicians. Like all outstanding protest music, Tarika's
raises the consciousness while it quickens the pulse.
- Eamon Dolan
Papas Fritas
Helioself
minty fresh
The second disc from this
Massachusetts twee^o delves
even further into delicate
anthem pop. Guitarist Tony
Goddess calls himself a "head¬
phone listener" and his crafty
shoestring arrangements are
stereophonic proof. Vocally,
the Papas revere The Beach
Boys' open-voweled harmon¬
ies and the ho key cliches of
timeless teen radio; "Sing
About Me" is a Replacements-
style raver that updates The
Supremes' "Come See About
Me." Goddess, bassist Keith
Gendel, and drummer Shivika
Asthara all sing airily, lending
Helioself a flower-powered
Weltanschauung rarely wit¬
nessed without winks and
nudges - James Sullivan *
U2
pApAs frit As
HELIOSELF
Phillip Kent
Bimstein
Garland Hirschis Cows
Starkland
Using simple sampling and
postminimalist repetitive tech¬
niques, Bimstein creates
works that are quirky and
thoroughly engaging. Rein
forcing found melodies,
rhythms, colors, and textures,
he molds materials into com¬
positions. Bimstein's whim¬
sical spirit manifests itself in
"The Door," a tone poem built
entirely upon samples of a
squeaky door, and shines on
the title piece, "a concerto in
three moovemems." The voice
and stories of farmer Hirschi -
electronically processed, along
with the cries of his cows -
are coupled with a synthe
sized accompaniment.
-Dean Suzuki m
Joe Zawinul
My People
Escapade Music
For more than two decades,
synth wizard Joe Zawinul has
melded Third World elements
into a jazz/fusion/funk context.
Cofounder and keyboardist
of the groundbreaking entity
collectively known as Weather
Report, Zawinul has lately
teamed with a plethora of
international musicians (those
assembled for this project
Include Alex Acuna, Salif Keita,
andTrilokGurtu) to create
a recording that is simply
manifest destiny. Refreshingly
uncomplicated, My People
represents world beat in Its
most evolved state - proof
that, decades later, Zawinul
is still making good use of
his musical passport,
- Chris 1 Walker •
^ HP
joE ZAWtNUL
my people
Lamb
iamb
Mercury
Louise Rhodes's folk vocals
and partner Andrew Barlow's
complex drum and bass
rhythms form a foundation
for this debut of wildly pro¬
gressive pop music. Lamb is
full of seemingly incompatible
sounds and potential contra¬
dictions - horns and string
bass, for example, alongside
tablasand ambient electronic
pulses - but songs such as
the punishing 'Lusty'1 and
the exotic "Gorecki" sound so
gorgeous that their individual
parts are inconsequential.
Bridging English folk and
underground club traditions
is a considerable feat; Lamb
makes it sound like the most
natural thing in the world.
Scoff Loves »
Third Rail
South Delta Space Age
Antilles/Verve
Yes, children, the electric sky-
church still exists, and James
Blood Ulmer is calling us to
worship. With a propulsive
guitar style and preaching,
mush-mouthed vocal ismo,
Ulmer leads this ail-star
ensemble through a compre¬
hensive discourse In future
blues. Featuring the robust
instrumental accompaniment
of Bemie Worrell, "Zigaboo"
Model iste, and Bill La swell,
Ulmer crisscrosses the chitlin
circuit with faiback organ,
marching percussion, and an
oozing, bassy bottom, A suit¬
ably indelicate testament to
a rich and earthy legacy, Space
Age integrates gospel swamp
rituai and primal field holler,
- Mitch Myers *
t
Autechre
Chiastk Slide
Warp
Its no coincidence that
tfufer/rreis reminiscent of the
word auteur. Sean Booth and
Rob Brown produce techno
that stands out like the impro¬
visations of classical virtuosos.
The pair's skill lies rn tweaking
the familiar, giving mechani¬
cal sounds orchestral breadth
and imbuing traditional strings
with an unnerving air On this
fourth release, Autechre takes
its oblique acoustics one step
further, changing the relation¬
ship of beat and melody with
each successive song, Chiastk
Slide ends with the soothing
"Muane/1 in which Autechre
toys with emotion and rhythm
on a macrocosm Ec scale.
Dance music for the troubled
psyche, - Dan Sicko •
Annbjorg Lien
Rrfrroe
Shanachie
What is it with these Scan¬
dinavians? They've erupted
like a musical Viking horde,
rel nven ting the! r mu s i ca I
traditions and dispatching
them to conquer the globe.
Take Annbjorg (Jen: her sound
might be rooted in the medi¬
eval tonalities of the Hardan-
ger fiddle, but she's equally
happy to take a stroll through
acoustic clubland or shoot
into the chilled-out ambience
of space. Hers Is the new folk,
umbtlically linked to the past
but with a completely fresh
attitude, where current
sounds are as relevant as
those from the last century.
Lien will undoubtedly com¬
mandeer the future as well,
- Chris Nickson •
ARVO PART
De Profundis
THEATRE OF VOICES
Paul Hillicr
rs
Arvo Part
De Profundis
Harmonia Mundi
This anthology of choral works
by Estonian-bom composer
Arvo Part will move your ear
in remarkable ways: toward
simplicity, toward spirituality
and inner peace. Recorded In
churches with organ accom¬
paniment, Paul Hillier's fine
Theatre of Voices performs
nine pieces ranging from
somber, sacred chants to jar¬
ring contemporary harmo¬
nies, Throughout, voices fold
and dovetail like slowly mov¬
ing dancers, sounding chords
of celeb ration, sorrow, fright,
and rage. In an increasingly
electronic world, De Profundis
reminds us that our original
acoustic instrument is still
capable of the greatest emo¬
tional range. - Colin Berry .
WIRED JUNE 1997
D50
Tedc\n$2jnment
SEPT 97 CONFIRMED & UNCONFIRMED PRESENTERS
PAUL ALLIN* Founder The Paul Allen Group
JEFF BERG* CEO International Creative Mgt.
KEN BRECHER Director Sundance Institute
JAMES BURKE* Creator Connections
KEN BURNS* Documentary filmmaker
Rtf BURNS Documentary Filmmaker
JAMES CAMERON* Director, Writers Producer
LUYEN CHOU CEO Learn Technologies Interactive
ELIZABETH DALEY Dean USC Rim School
ANTONIO & HANNA OAMASIO University of Iowa
EDWARD de BONO Auth or & Consultant
BABY JANE DEXTER Chanteuse
LAN I DUKE Dir, Getty Center for Education & Arts
BRAN FERREN Exec VP Walt Disney ! Engineering
ED FRIEDRICHS Architect Genster & Associates
ELLEN F UTTER* Amer. Museum of Natural History
BILL GATES* CEO Microsoft
ROBERT GIRALDI President Giraldi Suarez Prod
STEPHEN JAY GOULD Prof. Harvard & Author
BILL GROSS Chairman Idealabl
HERBIE HANCOCK* Musician & Composer
WINDALL HARRINGTON Theatrical Designer
NOBUYUKI IOEI* President Sony Corp.
^UNCONFIRMED
Fechn ftiinment
CONFERENCE THEME
TED/Technotainment is about a marriage
that occurs after a long engagement.
The entertainment & technology industries
have now tied the knot with many emerging
parallel systems of learning independent of
the educational bureaucracy.
The most creative & talented individuals,
their ideas, the means of distribution & an
attitude focused on understanding have
found a home in the entertainment industry,
which together with the technology busi¬
ness forms technotainment.
This is the cornucopia of future learning - a
major business & the only force in America
that can work towards a leveling of the
playing field.
This will be the great American business in
the 21st CenturyJhis business will form the
foundation of America's creative economy in
the decades ahead.
TED ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Pam Alexander CEO Alexander Communications
Steve Frankfort Chairman Frankfurt Balkind
Nancye Green President Donovan & Green
Bob Greenberg President R/GA
Ken LererCEO Robinson Lerer Montgomery
Harry Marks Principal Marks Communications
Matt Mazer Executive VP Sony New Technologies
Courtney Ross Co-Founder The Ross School
Paul Sarffo Director The Institute for the Future
Kmko Satoh President The K Associates
Richard Said Wurman Chairman & Creative Director
24 SEPT/ 27 SEPT 1997
Produced with the generous assistance of NYNEX & Variety
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
PCratCL^T ■ OAVM . 1KVD.E ‘ LOS ANCELEi ■ HIVEIUIOE * 1AM * MN FFAh'GISOO
! ■AHUM ■ SANTA Qlll
DO’S JtTMENT Of INTEGRA!! V£ UlOUXlV
Professor Robert J. FuJl
DcpaitmenT of Iruegralive Biology
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720
TED7
Richard Saul Wurman ,
BEN KEI^ET. CALIFWLNIA 9J77D
U.a BERKELEY
OLy
TecUrxfainment
SEPT 97 CONFIRMED & UNCONFIRMED PRESENTERS
JON JERDE Architect Die Jeide Partnership
STEVE JOBS* CEO Next Computer, Pixar
GLENN JONES* President & CEO Jones Inti.
QUINCV JONES Musician & Producer
JOHN KERNAN Chairman Lightspah Partnership
JARON LANIER Musician & VR Pioneer
JOHN LASSETER* Director Pixar Toy Story
ANDY UPPMAN Deputy Director MIT Media Lab
MICHAEL MILKEN* Milken Family Foundation
SEYMOUR PAPPERT Prof. MIT Media lab
MARC RAIBERT President Boston Dynamics
DAVID ROCKWELL Principal Rockwell Group
COURTNEY ROSS The Ross School & Institute
NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF* Starbright Foundation
JOHN SCULLEY CEO Sculley Assoc
IVAN SE1DEN BERG* CEO Nynex Corp.
RAY SMITH* CEO Bell Atlantic Corpi
OLIVER STONE* Directors Writer
ALEXANDER TSIARAS* Creator Body Voyage
DAN WIEDEN President Wieden & Kennedy
] ALLEE WILLIS & PRUDENCE FENTON Willlsviile
TIM & NINA ZAGAT ZagatSurvey
^UNCONFIRMED
Techngwujwflif
REGISTRATION
lab
March 1, 1997
i can’t thank you enough for inviting me to speak at and attend
your conference!!! It was an experience I will never forget,
TED is the end-product of evolution you always hoped for! It's
that breath of fresh air after rising out of the hypoxic gunk. It s
pimply beyond description. It was compelling, stimulating, insightful,
emotional, eclectic-. 1 am certain you heard this before. Where else
could I have been offered funding for my research from the
government, the use of the San Diego Superccrmputing, able to discuss
the possibility of developing a more sensitive laser scanner, learn
about small MNR, been invited to disc ass biobots on cable television,
asked for data by an animation ics company, asked to be interviewed
by a design magazine, invited to give a lecture on biology/motion as
art and urged to come visit Microsoft? Listening to Li Ln - there are
no words.
I just wanted to formally thank you for the introduction and
your little video before my talk.
Thank you for taking the time to construct such a masterpiece
of a meeting!
Sincerely yours.
3*1
Robert J. Full
Chancellor's Professor
Integrative Biology
*Bob Full's presentation was one of more than 50 & was only for 15 minutes.
TID P0 Box 186 Newport Rl 02840
TEL 401 .848.2299 * FAX 401 .848.2599 * wurman@ted.com
TED/Technotainment will be held in the
SONY-IMAX THEATRE @ 68th & Broadway &
begins with registration 6:00-10:00 pm on
Wednesday 24 September with conference
sessions running from about 8:00 am- 7:00
pm Thursday 25 September - Saturday 27
September.
$2500 check/VlSA for attendance at all
sessions • $2750 including CD-ROMs * $100
fee for substitutions prior to 1 September
1997 - no substitutions thereafter • No
refunds for cancellations at any time, for any
reason ■ Registration at conference with
photo ID
See our website for a registration form - or
call or write or e-mail us for one - which
must be signed & returned for us to confirm
your registration
CD-ROM sets
available forTEDSELL 19% $150
& will be available for TED7 1997 $250
FUTURE TED CONFERENCES
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ted
•com|
TED8 MONTEREY CALIFORNIA
18-21 February 1998
TEDMED2 CHARLESTON SOUTH CAROLINA
13-16 May 1998
TED9 MONTEREY CALIFORNIA
17-20 February 1999
TEDX MONTEREY CALIFORNIA
23-26 February 2000
Combustible
Edison
When I was a kid 3 had
a Gilbert chemistry set,
I didn't realty learn a lot about
chemistry, but I did manage
to make some kind of purple
substance that, when hit with
a hammer, made a very satis¬
fying explosiofl-
I don't need that set any¬
more: now I have a CD-ROM
called AaivChemistry, a simu¬
lated laboratory for college
students. Although a hammer
is not included, I could prob¬
ably make that purple stuff if
I could remember what it was,
and I can still make satisfying
explosions with a virtual Bun¬
sen burner and faux electrical
switches. This, of course, satis¬
fies the adolescent male in me.
Sim Life for chemists.
The adult In me likes the
hard science. In addition to
tutorials by scientists, Activ-
Chemistry contains a simu¬
lation engine designed by
Sim Life creator Ken Karakot-
s$os. Just as in the real world,
an infinite number of experi¬
ments is possible l can make
complex compounds, look at
them in different ways, and
watch them react (they can
shoot off ionized electrons, for
instance). The iaws of quan¬
tum physics are built In, and
there's an electron gun for
bombarding molecules. Best
of all, cleaning up the lab is
easy - just Quit, - Rob Swtgart
ActivQimistry. US$19,95,
Benjamin/Cummtngs: [800}
322 1377, on the Web at
www.awt.com/bc.
Old New Journalism
“lie who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man”
1 mumbles Hunter 5. Thompson, teeing off a new dramatic audio CD
adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, his infamous tale of fast
cars, drugs, consumer excess, and good old-fashioned dope paranoia.
Thompson has been making a beast of himself in public for longer than
some of us have been on the planet, and in the process he has changed
the face of journalism.
The so-called gonzo school of feature writing, pioneered by Thomp¬
son’s semi-house-trained rants, makes the journalist as important as
the story. Fear and Loathing (for those of you who have been sheltered
from this particular slice of the psychotic 70s) tells the story of a road
trip to Vegas to cover the Mint 400 off-road race. Duke (Thompson’s
alter ego) and his 210- pound, mescaline-guzzling Samoan attorney
manage to miss the event entirely, and spend an indeterminate period
of Lime tripping and screaming their way around Ihe desert. This is
journalism, people, but not as we know it
Hai'd to believe it’s been a quarter of a century since Fear and Loath-
*>y Hunter s. Thompson
Pure audio dope,
ing first appeared as a two-part Rolling Stone article. Impossible to
believe I hat a dramatic adaptation could be anything other than a lame
cash-in on the anniversary. Amazingly, it works.
This is mainly due to the superb east. It’s laconically narrated by
Harry Dean Stanton, who somehow is the only person you could ima¬
gine doing the job. Ubercool director Jim Jarmusch and character actor
Maury Chaykin play journalist and attorney, locked in a constant shout¬
ing match made more bizarre by their tendency to wave knives at each
other and see giant lizards in hotel lobbies.
An atmosphere of true madness is maintained throughout, leavened
with nice touches like Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner playing, er,
the Rolling Stone editor who gives Duke “total credit” for expenses -
and a white Caddy - when he hires the writer to cover the District
Attorney’s Drugs and Narcotics Conference.
It’s a helluva road trip, and far more fun than any other audiobook
Tve ever heard (especially in the car). Just put your foot to the floor,
and if the cops stop you, make sure the guns are hidden under the seat.
- Hart Kunzrn
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas audiobook, by Hunter S. Thompson: US$16.99. Island Records:
+1 (212) 353 8000.
A Most Dangerous
Professional
Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has proven twice -
with Delirious New York and SMLXL ~ that he
can engineer dazzling and grandiose books as well
as striking and bawdy structures. Over the last year,
he has also proven quite adept in the rote of cele¬
brated artist. A fountainhead of paradoxes, artspeak,
and glib-yet-acute observations, his mode, writes
editor Sanford Kwinter in Rem Koolhaas: Conversa¬
tions with Students , is "to convert optimism into dan¬
ger and make that danger speak.”
Yet, if anything, Koolhaas's splashy press reception
kept me from fully appreciating his work. Between
The New York Times's swoon and his confessional
moments in S,Af,£,Xi, he risked becoming the Henry
Rollins of urban planning. After reading Kwinter's
collection, however, I've become one of his pupils.
Rem Koolhaus , a thin, handsome, paperback that a
young architect at my corner bar insist I read, con¬
tains a witty lecture, a smattering of Q&A, and Kwin¬
ter's essay, "Flying the Bullet, or When Did the Future
Koolhaas: armed with rhetoric and urban plans.
Begin?" Like Koolhaas's own books, it mixes text
with graphics; unlike his works, which this book has
helped me better appreciate, it distills rather than
inflates the architect's thoughts.
The takeaway from conversations is, I admit, some¬
what elusive. It is not a quick and easy lesson, nor
does it nicely illustrate the habits of a highly effec¬
tive person. Koolhaas grasps the rhetorical and prac¬
tical advantages of systems out of control. Like Rene
Magritte, he likes it surreal. And, as critic lan Buruma
has pointed out, Koolhaas has made global cultural
confusion an asset. He's at ease with contradictions.
He likes them.
Here's what 1 can say for sure: Rem Koolhaas offers
a way to pierce the hype surrounding its subject and
may inspire you to look at your own profession the
way he views architecture: as a will-o'-the-wisp, as
something you want unknowable so that you may
continue to make discoveries. - Brad Wieners
Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with Students, by Sanford Kwinter
{editor) and Sze Tsung Leong (designer): US$14.95. Chronicle
Books: +1 (415)537 3730.
WIRED JUNE 1997
Dec
KAHN- BLAKE&0ERG' WHITMAN JENNING&
Copy, Paste
Any writer or editor who
has been around for a
while can attest to the joys
of Copy and Paste commands.
Unfortunately, they haven't
evolved much over the years.
As an editor for an Internet
directory, I spend a large part
of my day shuffling around
Web addresses, titles, and text.
While I switch endlessly back
and forth between programs,
I curse Apple for not enabling
me to copy more than one
item at a time,
But praise be to generous
programmers. On Shareware
.com, I discovered a 293K sys¬
tem extension that expands
my copying capabilities tern
fold. Copy Paste's nifty text¬
processing tools let you shift
case, tab, or insert text files,
pictures, and sounds into a
clipboard - the floating pal-
Shareware wow,
ette keeps track of what's
where. Even neater is the clip
archive, which drops copied
items into a folder on your
desktop - fabulously conve¬
nient for online researchers.
But why does Copy Paste
enable you to insert dates
according to the Baha'i calen¬
dar? Because Baha'i is what
motivated co-creator Peter
Hoerster (with designer Jul¬
ian Miller) to program this
product. Browse the help
section, and you'll find an
invitation for the faithful to
email him. Whether you're
converted or not, it's a bless¬
ing for any writer or editor.
- Debbie Efkind
Copy Paste 3. 3.1 shareware
for Mac: US$20. Julian Miller/
Script Software: -f 1 (916) 546
9005, emailjMon@siemo.nef,
on the Web at members.aol
.com/copypaste 1/index.html.
TOW GARDNER, who founded The Motley Fool investing forum (www
iool.com/) with his brother David, is working on his second book f You
Have More Than You Think.
Downsize Your Debt: Howto Take Control of Your Personal Finances, by
Andrew Fe tab erg. This is a personal-finance guide to managing your
debt: how to pay it down, and renegotiating with creditors. The Web
potential of this book is huge. For instance, credit card rates have risen
to 18.5 percent, but only high-risk borrowers should be paying that rate.
Online, people would be able to share experiences and get advice. Com¬
panies won't be able to benefit from customers' ignorance."
Howto Drive Your Competition Crazy: Creating Disruption for Fun and Profit,
by Guy Kawasaki with Michele Moreno. "We think of this book as incred¬
ibly foolish. Kawasaki argues that companies should focus on serving
their customers rather than on what their competition is doing. Though
he is an Apple Fellow, that company has not been applying his approach,
Ironically, his message is exemplified by Microsoft, which persistently
asks its customers what they want and tries to improve its products for
the average person /'
PHILIPPE KAHN, of Borland International fame, co founded Starfish Soft¬
ware in J 994 and lives in California's Santa Cruz Mountains,
Music scores. "I play jazz. It's my form of meditation, a workout for the
soul. So I listen to a lot of jazz and transcribe and play along. Trane
and Bird are the masters. Hearing their solos is better than reading a
book - it's instant poetry. On my nightstand, i have a reprint of Johann
Sebastian Bach's original score for The Art of Fugue. I love to see his
handwriting and hear the music in my head. It's magical. It's as if he
sent me a personal note."
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "I first read it in
French. When I came to the US I tried it in English, which prompted me
to reread the French version. And now I'm trying - for the second time
- to read it in Spanish. It's a different experience every time, I should
have started with Spanish, though. In its original the language sounds
like flamenco - passionate and imaginative and full of mystical energy,"
ALLEN WH ITMAN plays bcrss for The Mermen, cowrites a column in EQ
magazine, and makes a great spaghetti sauce.
Pharmako/poeia; Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft, by Dale Pendell.
"The book is written for the modern-day alchemist; it combines the
heart and the mind, science and the soul. Pendell writes beautifully
and has the facts to back up his ideas. This is one of the best and most
useful books I have ever read. It helped me quit smoking."
Anything by Salman Rushdie* "Arguably one of the greatest literary
geniuses alive today. Certainly one of the best storytellers, Rushdie is
absolutely brilliant and very funny; his social commentary and obser¬
vations of the human condition are written with a sense of humor.
My favorite is The Satanic Verses, though I'm slightly embarrassed to
admit it. I haven't read The Moor's Last Sigh yet I'm waiting for the right
time. To me, a good book is a banquet - it fills me the way a great
meal does. A great book should be savored like a box of chocolates."
OSD
the essential electronic
music collection.
"the chemical brothers
* fluke
* underworld
* the future sound of Eondon
*phot0K
♦nphex twin
* orbital
* tranquility bass
*goldie
* prodigy
*josh wink
*the crystal method
* atari teenage riot
its all you’ll ever need.
Imagine...
A fully-digita] campus.
Where Macintosh, PC and
SGI workstations happily
co-exist... with millions of
dollars of software.
\
Where evei*y computer
is networked.
Where every computer has
high-speed fibre optic access
to the Internet. „v
Where the environment is
“the coolest place to study
this stuff in the world.”
Where the doors are open
24 hours a day.
VFS Offers Programs in:
Mnl t lined in Product ion
Filin Production
Classical Animation
3D Computer Animation
Certified Alias AVa vefro n t
Certified Avid
Certified Digidesign/
ProToolts
Call.
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Nothing does.
Call: 1-800-661-4101
E-mail: qu&ry45@multimedia.edu
Web: http://www,multimedia.edu
VANCOUVER FILM SCHOOL
#400 - 1168 Hamilton Street,
Vancouver, B.C. CANADA V6B 2S2
Groupware
Groupware technology is following the rarest arc in high tech: steadily
downward. While most software is becoming smarter (my wordproces-
sor can balance my checkbook, for god's sake), groupware applications
keep aiming lower and lower. We have gone from the early days of prom¬
ised real-time cooperative work to the glory days of Lotus Notes to today's
inane "discussion groups." The fact that Netscape's new groupware strat¬
egy is based on MNTP - the decrepit, 1 3-year-old Usenet protocol - tells
you just where the market is headed.
MEMS
There is a nagging suspicion among industry opinion makers that micro¬
chips aren't sexy anymore. Biotech and cloning could be the next big
thing, these experts grudgingly agree, but who wants to learn a whole
new field? So it's no surprise that industry pundits are instead eyeing
microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), hybrid chips that combine
tiny motors and sensors with smart circuitry. It's new but familiar tech¬
nology. Besides, they argue, Oarpa is heavily funding MEMS research -
and Darpa brought us the Net, True, But Darpa also brought us 30 years
of artificial intelligence boondoggles.
This Month's
Overhyped Memos
Hype
Level
Position
Last Month
Expected
Lifetime
Groupware
&
0
9 months
MEMS
m
4 months
Digital Certificates
1.
11 months
Enters MMX
<JSS
&r
2 months
Opener Than Thou
&
0
l months
Q*= EfTiijryonk meme (4? = Meme on the rise ■ Mass-media meme About to die from over-exposure
Digital Certificates
Everyone talks about how dangerous and insecure the Net is, but I'm
about ready to walk around naked. It's either that or drown in a sea
of code. I've got my PGP key, seven login sequences and passwords,
four digital IDs, and a plethora of free VeriSign digital certificates. 1 can
prove my identity so many different ways it would make a banker blanch.
My email is so secure, not even the NSA can read it But if I devoted my
brainpower to remembering what I need to do, instead of what my pass¬
words are, I might be able to actually get some work done.
Inters MMX
While most microprocessor developers are exploring VIEW, IRAM, and
other modern techniques, Intel is just discovering vector processing -
an approach that went stale in 1972. While PowerPC is doubling Its chip's
dock speed, Intel promises a meager 10 to 20 percent improvement.
We're talking, of course, about MMX, the much-hyped, microscopically
improved addition to Intel's Pentium flagship. As Andy Grove likes to
say, "Only the paranoid survive," but fear seems to have Intel paralyzed.
Opener Than Thou
Given the overwhelming success ofTCP/IR vendors are falling over them¬
selves to promote their solutions as equally "open," But most developers
really want to lock you in with a proprietary solution. Here's a short dic¬
tionary to help translate the resulting doublespeak: An open standard
"with a few proposed extensions" is the same thing as "proprietary."
An open standard that is "sponsored" by Microsoft is "proprietary." And
an "enterprise -wide open standard" is one that is specific to a vendor's
line of products - which means "proprietary/'
- Sfeve G. Steinberg (hype-list@wired.com)
Seeing Stars
As my plane flew over the
former Soviet Union en
route to Tokyo one starry
night, I opened Victor Pele¬
vin's slim, mysteriously titled
novel Oman Raf recently trans¬
lated from Russian into Eng¬
lish (and German, French,
Dutch, and Japanese),
Remember when launch-
ing satellites was as heralded
as sending wireless email?
Pelevin, a thirtysomething
Moscow novelist and voice
of postglasnost hip, captures
the absurdity of over roman¬
ticizing technology in this
clever flashback satire, in
which cosmonaut Omon
Krivomazov is ordered to kill
himself after piloting what is
supposed to be a roboticized
expedition to the Moon,
Pelevin lavishes the reader
with elegant description ("I
ran outside and stood there
Postglastnost hip,
. . . swallowing my tears as I
stared up at the bluish- yellow,
improbably near orb of the
moon in the transparent win¬
ter sky"), and he pokes subver¬
sive fun at 70s political culture
(Henry Kissinger hunts men in
bear costumes during a visit
to Russia),
What makes Omon Ra an
intriguing read is witnessing
the drama through the pro¬
tagonist's wide-eyed point
of view. Curious and sincere,
Omon ceaselessly questions
how things work, hungrily
analyzing his surroundings -
from the ii logically small sup¬
ply of rations in his spacecraft
to the ubiquity of macaroni
stars in the cafeteria soup.
-ReenoJana
Omon Ra, by Victor Pelevin
(translated by Andrew Brom-
flefd): USSB. Farrar, Straus
and Giroux: +1 (212) 741
6900.
□ e El
Street tred Contributors
Wagner James Au (wjammu@well.com) is said to resemble a
Eurasian Jackie Chan, albeit with a slightly smaller nose.
Rogier van Bakel (mgier@li.cofn), a Wired contributing editor, is,
according to his INS card, a "resident alien." He speaks a mixture
of Dutch, English, and Vulcan.
Colin Berry (cotm^wiredxom) edits Wired's music section and is
writing a pedestrian's guide to free art in San Francisco.
Eamon Dolan (eamon. dolan^harpercoifinsxom) edits books in New
York and San Francisco.
Debbie Elfcind (debbi@sirhisxom) is a San Francisco-based freelance
writer and editor for Lycos, InfoMatton Echo, and CNET,
Sim sen Garfinkel (simsong&mitedu) is HotWired's technology
columnist,
Danny Hill is is a Disney Fellow and vice president of research and
development at Walt Disney Imagineering. He cofounded Thinking
Machines Corporation.
Reena Jana contributes to The New York Time s Magazine , Hash Art,
and Asian Art News . She needs constant visual stimulation.
Hari Kunzru {hari@dircon.co.uk} is probably wandering around
London's Soho looking for new brands of bottled beer. If you see
him, remind him he has to work, tomorrow.
Mitch Meyers {comebaek@mcs.com} is a psychologist and a free¬
lance writer. He lives in Chicago and Manhattan and spends a lot
cftimeonthe phone.
Chris Nkkson (cnkks @spryne t com) was born in England and now
lives in Seattle. Please have pity on him.
Chris Rubin {can/bin@ooLcom) is a Los Angeles-based writer with
plenty of time on his hands for actual grocery shopping.
Dan Sicko furhftrur@mjddsprjbg.ifom)1 is a contributing editor for
Urb magazine, fledgling copywriter, webzine publisher, and Boston
terrier wrangler.
James Sullivan fonion65@aoi.com} is a regular contributor to a
whole bunch of pop culture periodicals.
Dean Suzuki, PhD (dsuzuki@sfsu.edu} , teaches music at 5an Fran¬
cisco State University, He is also a programmer at KPFA in Berkeley,
California.
Rob Swig art, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, is
the author of Portal, an interactive novel from Activision. He plans
to move to the 19th century sometime soon.
Scott Taves { itcives@interaaess.com) ss the US manager of B+W
music and The Blue Room record labels and author of A Pocket Tom
of Games on the internet
Chris J. Walker fcwirfkecJ@compuserve.comJ is a freelance journalist
living in Los Angeles who covers alternative, jazz, and world beat
music.
Brad Wieners (braddog@wired.com) an editor at Hardwired, writes
for Details and TimeOut Net and mouths off at Sack.
Gary Wolf is executive editor at HotWired.
Tt&toJAX- /££&?%, t. 5.5
&U.
i -tit&ti—l 7 C -f n N l
AND ON THE
EIGHTH DAY, WE
BULLDOZED IT.
The oldest rainforests date
back to the time of the dinosaurs.
100 million year ago. Today -
they offer the last refuge for half I
of all the plant and animal |
species on earth.
But how much time do |
rainforests have left?
Each day. fifty thousand
acres of rainforests are I
bulldozed, burned, degraded, |
destroyed. At this rate, the last |
traces of paradise w ill be gone in
a single human lifespan,
A miracle of creation wiped
out, at horrendous cost to our
environment.
What can you do to save the
last rainforests on earth?
You can support activists in
more than a dozen nations
fighting to conserve the splendid
variety of living things which
depend on these endangered
environments.
Jaguars, orchids, boas, birds...
not to mention 200 million people.
To get involved, simply mail
the coupon below. Tomorrow
won't wait.
Tell me more about the rainforests and
what I can do to help them,
NAME _
ADDRESS.
(TTY
STATE
ZIP
RAINFOREST
ACTION NETWORK
450 Sansome 7th FL San Francisco, CA 94111
Virgin’s Airport Shuttle.
We take care of you before you ever step foot on one of our planes. Because
only Upper Class® by Virgin Atlantic Airways offers complimentary chauffeured
service to and from each airport. Your trip to London begins when our private
sedan picks you up at your home or office. Then, after enjoying our award¬
winning Upper Class, you'll be greeted by a Flange Rover that will take you to
your ultimate destination. We provide the same service upon your return.
Wherever you're located, you'll be surprised by the lengths to which well go.
And remarkably Upper Cfass costs no more than a business class ticket So try
Virgin's Upper Gass and you'll find that even when you're not in the air, you’re
still under our wing. For more information and reservations call your travel
agent or Virgin Atlantic at BOO-862-8621.
virgin atlantic 'kt
Virgin Atlantic Airways offers all non-smoking flights to Great Britain from New York (JFK and Newark),
Boston, Uk Angeles. San Francisco, Washington (DulSes), Miami and Orlando.
net surf
Edited by Kristine Kern
www.mtbr.com/
Ride On!
Welcome to the World Ride Web, where the Bettys and Bobs of mountain biking flex
their full-suspenston savvy, talk titanium, and give blow-by-blows of their latest biffs.
Hardcore bikers have singletrack minds, but you'd never guess it from the diversity of
Web sites devoted to this sport. Rather than ride with the pack, blaze a trail of your own:
a great place to start is www.cyc/uig.org/.This global cycling network serves as a clear¬
inghouse of links to advocacy groups, racing pages, and even bike-friendly vacation
havens. If you know what you want but don't know where to find it, Pete's Bikindex
(www.pQnd.com/~mudboy/jsindex.html} - with more than 1 ,850 links - is the ticket.
You can track down a list of organized trips in your area, or, for hours of stationary fun,
check out Chris and Pete's SpeedCalc Bicycle Gearing Chart and rpm-to-mph calculator.
Of course, the fat-tire freedom trail can get expensive, and as the sport becomes more
commercialized, consumers must be shrewd. Not sure whether to throw down US$190
for a Shimano XT crank? Check out Mountain Bike Review (www.mtbr.com/). Bursting
with product reviews by bikers for bikers and organized by category, MTBR's 8,000
critiques of 700 products include a photo, price, and link - in addition to riders' postings
and ratings. The Marketplace section draws those buying, selling, or seeking virtually
any cycle-related item - the perfect forum to dear your garage of all that tired gear. The
more zealous bikers flock to this site for a daily hit of Passion, where visitors can drum
up sympathy for yesterday's taco ("I taco'd my wheel, and it cost me a hundred bones").
Need a translator? Try wortd.s id. com/~jimf/biking/$lang.htmI to figure out why a betty
may take offense if you comment on her bolt-on but will gladly show you her giblets.
Ross Finlayson's site at xenon.stanford.edu/-rsf/mtn-bikeMml also packs some great
howlers (including a prayer: "Our Father which art in Moab/ Mountain bike be thy
name/ To thy trailheads we come/Thy maintenance be done between straight¬
shooting information like "bunnyhopping for the complete spas” and singletrack tips
for beginners.
Two online publications make an excellent supplement to regular rides. You could
give your bike a complete tune-up while watting for the server at GearHead (www
tgearheadxom/)t but the RealAudio interview with Specialized bad boy Shaun Palmer
is worth it. The site also lists race standings and covers breaking industry news. Dirt Rag
(wwwxycleryxom/dir^ragh meanwhile, promises something more, well, earthy than
mainstream mags:"The editors are not Gods/1 it declares, "and Dirt Rag is not a bible."
(Amen!) Not only does this zine break the traditional mold, it offers an alternative to the
alternatives, issue 56 features a chat with suspension guru Paul Turner, a story about the
future of free trails, and a look at what manufacturers think about warranties.
Even meatier fare can be found at wwwxrtxom
/~boeschen/Bike/bike,htmt. Download one of D. Railleur's two novels, interview with
the RADAR Ranger or Singtetrack, for some good trailside reading .if you're not familiar
with the Northern California setting, this site's topographical map and photos give you
a good idea of what you're missing.
Looking for stellar mountain biking sites on the Web is a lot like trying to find the
perfect line down a path crowded with weekend warriors - once you get a taste of the
goods, nothing compares. You may have to pogo over a few stunned poseurs, but
hang on, relax, and let the trail take you home. - Kristine Kern {kkern@wired.com)
Bem
WIRED JUNE 1997
A Matter of Degrees
How'd you like to discover that your loan shark's brother has a high-
level position at a casino? While at times networking gems like this
surface in casual conversation, sixdegrees no longer leaves that to
chance. The site automates the linkage game, making it more efficient
and more accurate. Inventor Guglielmo Marconi once surmised that by the time the
wireless telegraph connected the country, we'd be able to find any¬
body on the planet through the interrelationships of 5. S3 people.
Based on this theory, sixdegrees uses the list of people you know
to connect you with those they know and so on. You fuel your net¬
working vehicle by signing up and referring a friend.
Sick Stick Scenes
Get cut off by somebody on your
way to work? Urban living tends
to bring out the worst in us -
causing postal workers to point
automatic weapons at you, sales¬
people to Ignore you, and middle-
ft _ ^4^
www.caivert.com/sfdt/sfdLhtml
class teenage punks to curse you
for not giving them spare change.
Stick Figure Death Theater can
help you to blow off that violent
steam, without the messy cleanup.
Three scenarios - the gun, the car,
and the exploding head - reenact
horribly savage deaths in simple
stick-figure style.
If you have a browser that
accepts animated GIFs, you are in
for minutes (this is the Web, after
all) of fun.
Image Is Nothing
Conventional advertising isn't about interaction, it's about image.
But online, most banner ads simply shout "Click me!" No style, not
much substance. So it was surprising to see that Hewlett-Packard
had ignored the status quo and eschewed typical lowest common
denominator Web design principles to build a Shockwave banner that
plays Pong . And that's ail it does. No bright colors, no jerky, animated
sales pitches. Just a little ball and your paddle against the computer's.
It could be the best banner ever, if only they'd make it a little bit
easier to win.
COIL ATE . YOU V ANT TO PL AY 1
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Transcendent Weirdness
If you've never sampled the dark and appealing literary hors d'oeuvres
of Donald Barthelme, you'd better scamper off to Jessamyn West's proper
little shrine. Barthelme's fame as a fiction writer sprouts from his arid, cutting humor
and his almost journalistic approach to the surreal. West's homage col¬
lects all known online Barthelmania and represents the only site officially
sanctioned by the estate of the author himself. Browse with vigor, and you
will be rewarded.
WIRED JUNE 1997
□ 60
It's All in
How You Look at It
Forget costly demographic studies - the best
place to finger the average neti zerYs pulse is
at Voyeur, a Peeping Tom's dream that displays
randomly selected real-time search subjects,
20 at a throw.
Refreshed thrice a minute and dog legged off
Magellan's search engine, the site cracks a gritty
window on the Web's dark, oft- i 1 1 iterate heart:
sure, there's the expected''nverdancefickets"
and ''bongs/' along with the predicta ble "thong
bikiniswand''sex/but you have to wonder about
Double Double
Toil and Trouble
The saying "Those who walk in love and truth
shall grow in honor and strength" greets each
connection to The Witches' Voice, Grounded
in Boston, Massachusetts, the undiluted
threads of digital magic that make up this
informative cyberspace offer a profound
mythos for our increasingly obvious intercon¬
necting global/universaf web of life* A news
and education network for witchcraft as a
pagan religion, this site is rich with compas¬
sion, honoring the sacrifices of the past.
Elemental texts like the Witches Rede and
the Three-Fold Law share the spotlight with
Random 5otmd Byte o' the Month
Check it out:
queen-frp.com
/AUDIO/WAV/bicyde. wav
The bomb of singletrack motivation
for those with a retro bent!
"neon bowling" aficionados or the poor sap inves¬
tigating "death by inhibition.""BombP""pipe
bomb," and "gas bomb" popped up one night,
as did "ticked his nipples, ""click here to vomit,"
and the mysterious "hydrogen embrittlement."
Typos and plain old bad spelling are indistin¬
guishable - but"Bermuta Triangle/^scoltarship,"
and "marajauna" offer telling clues.Theseare
the topics that pique a generation due to inherit
the planet?
voy e ur, m ck intey . co m /voyeur, eg/# voyeur ? 7
www. witch vox . com/
the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the
Advanced Bon ewits' Cult Danger Evaluation
Frame, stories of modern witch persecutions,
and a Witchcraft FAQ. Plunge into the hyper¬
techno spell of electronic modem hand¬
shakes and know the light of pure and true
Magkk.
Thanks to the
Wired 5.06 Surf Team
Colin Berry colin@wired.com
Colin tingle cofint@starwave.com
Marissa Raderman maraderman@aoLcom
John Ruel johnreui@aof.com
Anne Speedie anne@wtred.com
Journey
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OR SOFTWARE ARE
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TIME WARNER ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING IS AN ARRANGEMENT OF
WARNER BOOKS. INC. AND LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY, INC
@1997 WARNER BOOKS, INC. A TIME WARNER COMPANY
D6Q
In the Zone
< 134 the ice in February and at one
point grew a goatee to cover the stitches.
“We have software and databases that deal
with every single sport, every single league
in each of those sports, every single team,
every single player. Every single game and
scoring event dial happens in any event at
any time is live, within a few seconds.”
And that's just the back end. The real fun
happens out front, where, during March,
as the parsers were struggling to keep up
with every jump shot and turnover in the
64-team NCAA tournament, SportsZone
put even more daylight between itself and
the rest of the online sports pack - CBS
SportsLine, MSNBCs Sports (its most pop¬
ular site), and other big-time entries from
USA Today and CNN.
That's when it launched Starwave Direct,
a push-media channel that works with
Microsoft's new Active Desktop, Netscape’s
Constellation, or SportsZone's own cus¬
tom-built client. The idea: a system that
infers - from watching where you go on
the site, as well as a site map of your pref¬
erences - that you follow, say, anything
involving hockey and only the 49ers in
football, and that you don't care about
auto racing or baseball drug busts.
It then transparently - there's that word
again - feeds you the stuff you want, when
you want it No muss, no fuss. Says Naugh-
ton, “Most Web sites scramble to keep up
with each new announcement, pushing
unproven, unstable, and sometimes unus¬
able technologies on unsuspecting users.
We understand the difference between good
technology7 and specious hype.” Modesty
doesn't seem to be part of Naugh ton's cur¬
rent playback; Slade calls him a predator
- an epithet pretty close to the ultimate
SportsZone compliment.
In fact, no one at SportsZone is shy about
the site's underlying ambition: to reinvent
sports coverage. Publisher Geoff Reiss says
it's a matter of switching viewpoints. “When
two teams make a trade or when it was
announced the other day that the Patriots
are going to pick up the Jets' third- and
fourth-round picks this year, second-round
pick next year, and first-round pick in 1999
in exchange for allowing Bill Parcells to
coach, the first thought that goes through
a sports fan's mind is. Who got the better
deal? Who made out?” says Reiss,
“But it's amazing how little traditional
sports media looks at it the way the sports
fan looks at it” he adds, “Fans want to be
experts; they want to tell you everything
you want to know about Bill Parcells. But
I don't know how much the traditional
sports media really answers the basic
questions the fans have about the way
things work and what’s behind that. The
traditional sports media has more and
more worked as a relatively detached
filter of information.”
Hence another SportsZone mission:
to make subscribers, 95 percent of whom
are mate and whose average age is 24,3
years, part of the story. They'll send a
reporter into a locker room after an NBA
game and open the questions up to online
viewers. Anything you want to know from
George Karl? The reporter - a SportsZone
staffer or an ESPN TV regular on loan -
will relay Karl's answers via laptop to the
editors in Bellevue, who post them online.
“Can we give each fan a distinct voice?
No, that's not realistic,” Reiss says. “But
can we make it a pretty high priority to
create opportunities for fans to be looped
in? Yes. And it's an interesting part of the
story that, say, 60 percent of the fans -
a lot of whom are as knowledgeable as
anyone covering the sport - think the
Angels won in this ftade or that the Dod¬
gers got screwed.”
Andy Scott, the 26-year-old associate
publisher - his sport is basketball - puts
it this way: “We just kick back and say,
‘What do wre want to see?'” That's the
approach that spurred SportsZone to
develop a sophisticated polling applet
that enables users to select, for example,
whom they think deserves to he baseball's
highest-paid player. That was the question
posted 20 minutes after Barry Bonds's
record-breaking $11 million annual con¬
tract was announced. After Dennis Rodman
was suspended for 11 games for kicking a
photographer, the question was, Will he he
suspended again by the end of the season?
The kick is that the poll isn't just inter¬
active - it's real-time. You just select your
answer and hit Submit Vote. Within two
minutes, a results window7 pops onto your
screen, reflecting your vote and showing
how it stacks up against other fans' choices.
For the salary poll, 27,699 fans weighed
in: 49.7 percent gave the nod to Ken Grif¬
fey Jr., against only 16.3 percent for Bonds.
As for Rodman, 57.6 percent thought he'd
get another heave-ho. Sure enough, he did,
a couple of weeks later, for slapping another
player in the crotch.
Another hot feature is SportsZone's sort-
able stats, which lets a user custom-build
what amount to dynamically updated sports
spreadsheets, “Every' time you hit a page,
the tool can look at the statistics for a cer¬
tain player or conference or league or posi¬
tion, can filter it by group, and can also
soil it by points per game, points per played
minutes, rebounds per game, rebounds
per played minute” explains engineering
manager Steve Beck. That sounds harder
than it is.
Using software to make things go easy
is another SportsZone hallmark. The
much-improved ListRankei; for example,
allows users to draw up a list of, say, their
all-time favorite NBA guards or their fav¬
orite college football teams of 1993, then
see howr it stacks up against other users'
choices. Last year, this process required
a lot of complicated HTML forms; nowr
it's a Java-powered drag-and-drop.
There's even bigger game down the
road: convergence wTith television. The
site's full name isn't ESPNET SportsZone
for nothing, and everyone knows that the
real prize will he to amalgamate the best
of what TV can do - brilliant visuals and
real-time clarity - and the best of the Web:
responsiveness, depth, and interactivity,
one-on-one. Downloadable video high¬
lights are already happening; streamed
video is in the wrorks. The goal, says Reiss,
is to create “the ultimate buffet, the i69 ►
The goal is to offer fans "the ultimate buffet,"
says Reiss. "What it comes down to is how
much of it we can put under the hood."
WIRED JUNE 1 9 S 7
an invitation
to jointhe Wired Reader Panel
Name:
Address:
City/State/Zip:
Phone number:
Email address:
By joining the Wired reader panel, you are helping us to continue to bring you the most dynamic
magazine available. Over the next year, we will send you a series of research surveys. Your responses
will be essential as they will contribute to further understanding our readers. Responses to the
attached survey will remain strictly confidential. As a thank you for responding to this survey we
will enter you In a drawing to win a PalmPilot™ Professional or one of 25 Wired CD cases.
We would appreciate a reply by June 30, 1997.
1 . How did you obtain this issue of Wired 7
O Subscriber
O Newsstand
O Friend/Relative
O Other (Please specify)
2. What is your gender?
O Male O Female
3. What is your marital status?
O Single, never married
O Married/ Living with Partner
O Separated/Divorced
C Widowed
4. What is your age?
C under 18
O 18-24
O 25-34
G 35-44
O 45-49
O 50-54
O 55-64
O 65 or older
5. What is the highest level of education you
have completed to date? (Please check one only)
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6. What was your approximate household
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O $100,000-149,999
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(Please check one only)
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G Consulting
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Q MIS/1T/IS
G Research & Development
O Sales/Marketing
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9. What industry are you currently employed in?
{i,e. publishing, medicine, computers,
telecommunications, etc.) [Please write in)
f/SHSS
. ^
Ir^Ja . — •— „
Manage your schedule, personal information,
and email remotely and on your desktop with the
pocket-sized PalmPilot™. It stores thousands of entries
and syncs data instantly with your PC. Optional links
to Schedule+ and Lotus* Organ izer'*’ make PalmPilot™
the perfect companion for the mobile executive.
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in your company. (Please check one only)
O Less than 10 0 500-999
O 10-24 O 1,000 - 4,999
G 25 - 49 0 5,000 - 9,999
O 50 - 99 O 10,000 or more
0 100 - 499
11. Do you maintain an office at home for
either personal or business use?
O Yes, for personal use
O Yes, for business use
O No, neither
1 2. Do you access the Internet at home
or at work?
Browser
Yes, at home O
Yes, at work O
No, neither O
Online Service
O
O
O
1 3. Are you involved in Web site development
for your company?
OYes ONo
1 4. Have you ever used any of the following
World Wide Web sites? Please check all that apply
a. HotBot (Wired's search engine)
b. HotWired (WiredJs Web site)
C Wired News (Wired's W&b-based News Service)
a.
b.
c.
Yes, 1 use it frequently
O
o
o
Yes, 1 use it occasionally
O
o
o
Yes, I've visited it before
o
o
o
No, but I've heard of it
o
0
o
No, I've never heard of it
o
o
o
1 5. Have you ever registered as a member of
HotWired or one of its sister services?
O Yes O No O Don't Know
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Fold here and tape dosed. No staples please.
In the Zone
< 168 all-you-can-eat for consumers of
sports* It comes down to how easy do we
make it for you, how much of it can we
put under the hood”
It’s the early days of March Madness, the
1997 NCAA Division I basketball finals,
and Dan Shanoff, SportsZone’s 24-year-
old college hoops guru, is standing over
a desk editor in the main SportsZone
newsroom, dictating a preview for one
of tomorrow's 16 first-round games, “UCLA
holds a large, inside advantage he’s say¬
ing, “but the scrappy . * ” Someone inter¬
rupts to confirm that he’s just updated the
site’s special NCAA front-page index to
reflect the results of the Texas-Wisconsin
match* Another staffer says that some¬
body “upstairs” doesn’t like the word
index out front, and wants a more color¬
ful title. From left field, someone else
yells out that Gordy Howe is making a
comeback, but Shanoff is already back
rattling off previews; “The Musketeers
could pose problems for a backcourt
whose play has been spotty at best * . ”
The NCAA championships are show
time in the online sport s world, and with
64 schools’ worth of wired college kids
craving minute-by-minute fixes, Sports-
Zone’s 15 Sun and Hewlett-Packard
servers are setting records. Yesterday’s
was 4.9 million impressions, and today’s
traffic seems even heavier*
“Hey, look at this ” says someone eyeing
the Georgia- Chattanooga first-round game
on TV* “They want to run the clock, but
Chattanooga’s leading scorer fouls him in
the backcourt.” It’s an upset in the works,
with seconds left in the game, and Shanoff
comes over to watch. Suddenly there’s a
shout: Tin locked out!” Someone else
says calmly, “The server just shut down”
Everyone’s screen is frozen.
“It’s college students pounding the sys¬
tem - those kids are fanatics ” says Shanoff,
who looks like a student himself. The good
news, it turns out, is that only Bulldog,
the publishing system, is down; the pub¬
lic servers are fine, and the automated
features are running normally. Suddenly
sidelined, the editing crew stands around
watching the televised game* When a score
is announced or an impressive play is
made, high fives go around. Ten minutes
later, the system is back up, and everyone
goes back to work.
Live human editors are fun, but the data¬
base and dynamic pages give SportsZone an
incredible efficiency Three-quarters of its
100,000 pages - including scores, stats, and
schedules - are automated: the pages are
continuously updated and sent out on the
Web without encountering a human* Wire-
service news stories go straight to another
custom-built database. Editors make their
choices from a friendly front end that
shows the day’s headlines; they cut,
splice, or rewrite to taste, then pick a
template, write a headline, and go. “It
completely removes an editor from hav¬
ing to know HTML,” says Harry Snyder,
manager of the automated publishing
group. The templates allow producers
to define how a page gets formatted* It
describes what the page is going to look
like* It’s actually defining the HTML, but
it’s transparent to the editor.” Says Beck,
them* Instead of just saying, ‘I care about
the NBA, give me all the NBA stuff/ you
can say, £Oh, I care about the Blazers, but
not about that Blazer. I care about this
stat, not that stat*5
“Because we designed the database
first, we can do things in more precise
and more interesting ways” Slade adds*
And because we’re building the client,
it’s got an instrumentation in it that lets
us watch what you do: This guy never
reads about hockey. I’m never going to
send him anything about hockey*’”
Says venture capitalist Neil Weintraut,
a partner with the San Francisco-based
21st Century Internet Venture Partners,
“SportsZone is taking the consumer media
experience to the next level* It’s an early
manifestation of one of the Internet’s holy
grails - machines do the work, down to
the individual level ”
Could push lead SportsZone away from
HTML entirely? Naughton says that Web
pages will continue to be part of the mix
It's March Madness, and that's show time
for online sports - 64 schools' worth of wired
college kids craving minute-by-minute fixes.
“You just hit Publish and, boom! It’s out
to the front page”
Most of SportsZone runs in Java, and
not just In deference to Naughton* Every¬
thing is keyed to the database, which con¬
sists of executable objects preioaded with
all the content needed for a particular page
or feature. The system works like this:
Objects wait to get all the necessary con¬
tent - say, updated scores - from the ware
parser. Once the objects are full, they get
“published” in the system: a designated
Java template pulls in the necessary con¬
tent, then writes an HTML file. “The tem¬
plate language has some HTML in it ”
says Beck, “but we’re basically getting
away from that* It’s our own proprietary
language.”
Starwave Direct, the new push feature,
is even more heavily customized. “On the
front end, there’s a user experience that’s
almost like a next-generation PointCast,”
says Slade. “It has a way to change chan¬
nels and drill down relatively deep inside
“because they’re big traffic builders and
revenue sources” But he and the Sports¬
Zone engineering crew are also writing
eye-popping applications for both Active
Desktop and Constellation that simply
wouldn’t be possible with existing tech¬
nologies* Naughton jumps to a whiteboard
to show an example. “Take ScorePost
(a daily rundown of scores). There’s a
little applet that’s stuck in this document”
he says. “Pick it up, make it the whole
world, and put documents in it - a com¬
plete inversion of the Web site. Rather
than having applets stuck in documents,
you have Java code that owns the world
and understands it and treats documents
just like they’re images ” Translation: stats
that will do what you, the user, want
On SportsZone’s scale, that’s daunting.
“It’s easy to push a Web site like Slate or
Suck , basically a three-page Web site,” says
Naughton. “But with dose to 100,000
pages, it’s difficult to push the whole thing.
The worst thing is what Freeloader 1 70 ►
□ 60
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In the Zone
* i69 or BackWeb do, which is to take the
front page and one-level-deep every link
off of it” That's where big (and expensive)
engineering comes in. “The thing is to
be smarter” he says. “Environments like
Active Desktop or Constellation or Point¬
Cast are generic. They know virtually
nothing about the content. That really
homogenizes the user experience. We
need to do a lot more ”
Nobody around SportsZone seems to
doubt that they can do it* “We have pro¬
grammers here who are doing more com¬
plex things, on a bigger scale, with sports
statistics than they were doing before
with, say, airline reservation systems ”
says Slade. “How cool is that?”
But some things are bigger than even a
techno jock’s ego, “Our biggest problem is
bandwidth ” explains executive producer
Jeff Day, taking a quick breather on the
sidelines of a Friday intramural Ultimate
Frisbee match. “Probably half our users
loaded, the Mariners down by four runs,
this is what he’s done before.”5
A little bit further down the road. Day
says, “you’ll be able to tell your computer
or TV really specifically what your inter¬
ests are. So when Chattanooga’s about to
upset Georgia, you get email, or a window
opens up on your computer screen. Or you
could even get paged on your PDA and tune
in and watch it live - and you’d have syn¬
chronized live stats, even if you’ve tuned
in at the last minute *”
Those kinds of features won’t come
cheap, especially if the market in Inter¬
net sports broadcast rights heats up. The
issue reared its head in March, during
the Final Four weekend: NCAA officials
barred reporters from SportsZone and
other online sports-news sites from court-
side in Indianapolis, in an effort to mono¬
polize traffic for an official tournament
site, FinalFour.net.
Those excluded - including USA Today* s
online division, which threatened legal
action - were not amused, “You want your
With Disney aboard, one feature
you won't see on SportsZone is online sports'
potential killer app: instant betting.
are on their company networks and have
T1 connections to the Internet, But the
other half are at home and have modems.
That means when we design the Web site,
we’re fairly restricted as to how big we
can make applications and how big we
can make graphics. Two or three years
from now, with cable modems, more
ISDN, satellite connections to the Inter¬
net, ADSL, all that, weil be able to do
more heavyweight stuff.”
That can’t happen soon enough for
Team SportsZone. During my visit in
March, streamed video was getting
ready for launch. Live baseball on the
desktop, and then some: You’re watching
the Mariners, Griffey batting against
Clemens. You'll be able to click on Griffey
and get all the stats. Or SportsZone might
do it for you. “In real time ” says Day,
“we’ll go to our database and be able to
say, 'In this situation, against Clemens,
bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases
own people at events” says Gelman, who
had to scramble and run wire accounts,
“the same way you’d want your own peo¬
ple covering the White House.”
But Slade and his crew have a leg up -
several of them, in fact: ESPN’s backing,
along with long-standing deals to produce
official sites for both the NBA and the NFL,
More than that, though, SportsZone has
made a breakthrough on the revenue front,
proving that people - or spoils nuts, at
least - will pay for the right online stuff.
Launched late last year, SportsZone Pre¬
mium put a password -protected gate on
many of line site’s hottest features, includ¬
ing sortable stats, cybercasts of every NBA
game, and downloadable video highlights*
As a privately held company, Starwave is
guarded about numbers. But Heiss calls
the experiment in tiering “an unqualified
success. We've got people numbering well
into the tens of thousands.”
In April, that translated into expo- 172 ►
□ 70
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In the Zone
^ 170 nentially bigger numbers: after
months of closed-door negotiations,
Disney - already part owner of Sports-
Zone through ESPN - paid an undis¬
closed sum, reportedly $100 million,
for a controlling stake in Starwave
itself. The press releases went out of
their way to say that Slade, Naughton,
and the rest would be staying on - with
suitably grander titles.
But the real payoff was a simultaneous
announcement: their first job in Mouse
Land would be to spearhead the long-
awaited online plunge by another little
Disney subsidiary, ABC News. “The Inter¬
net represents what news on demand
is all about ” .ABC chair Roone Arledge
says, vowing to make the new venture
“the world's premier Internet news ser¬
vice * Also in on the deal are Netscape
and AOL, with a combined 16 million
online vistors daily. In other words, tele¬
vision numbers.
Ironically enough, the squeaky-clean
Mouse connection probably bars Sports-
Zone from the one feature that some ana¬
lysts think could be online sports' true
killer app: instant betting. The billion-
dollar allure is obvious - so much so that
Washington lawmakers are already talk¬
ing about trying to ban Internet wagering,
But even without Disney, Starwave already
has partners - the NBA and the NFL, for
starters - who don't want to hear the word
gambling. And as an NBA owner, Paul
Allen couldn't even think about it. Not
that he needs the money.
But there are other things on my mind
as I watch Naughton fire slap shots in a
funky rink somewhere in Seattle's north¬
ern reaches. Pm on the ice beside him,
trying to balance on bad skates. But Naugh¬
ton makes it look easy, which sums up
what SportsZone does best - make things
look easy and have fun doing it.
And then it's Henry Weinhard's time
at a roadhouse saloou straight out of
Twin Peaks . Naughton's still rolling. “The
clean-and-simple user experience belies
the complexity and completeness of our
underlying software system ” he says.
“Unlike any other software en vironment
in the world, we manage to harness the
dynamic nature of the Web with almost
constant subtle technological refinement.”
Nine guys talk hockey and computers,
who's up and who's down in the NHL,
and how everybody played tonight. A sec¬
ond pitcher of beer arrives, there's more
hockey talk, then suddenly the conversa¬
tion switches to something that sounds
a lot more like Silicon Valley: how much
someone they all know overpaid for a hot
new car - what one of the assembled tes¬
tosterone-pumped geeks calls “a big dick
on wheels.” In the big leagues, wherever
they are, boys seem to still be boys, a ■ ■
Naughton fires off slap shots, doing what
SportsZone does best - make things look easy.
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3 Reasons
Why AltaVista
Is History:
404 NOT FOUND
DOCUMENT MOUED
NO DNS ENTRY
The traditional search engines — AltaVista” Excite" Infoseek" —
are barely adequate as information-gathering tools. But as windows into
the ancient history of the Internet, they're peerless. For historians, the
links these search engines relay are often the only evidence that remains
of a Web that once was, and is no longer.
For searchers, it just blows.
You
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forever.
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that actually exists. With SmartCrawl™ HotBot refreshes its
database by updating documents as soon as they change,
adaptively indexing sites at the same rate they're published.
And with 54 million documents in its database, the largest of its
kind, HotBot offers the ultimate resource for students of
contemporary history — everything, everywhere, as it exists right now.
The Wired Search Engine
www.hotbot.com
FIREWALL
m iso According to Zhuang Dundi, the
suited college student who earns spare
cash as the cafe's tutor, “So far, we’ve
had no incidents ” It's not hard to see
why, “We have three levels of ‘firewall/7*
he says, “Our company filters things once,
ChinaNet itself has its own filtering sys¬
tem, and then we keep an eye on every¬
thing here/'
Despite the less than user-friendly envi¬
ronment, Sparkice can attract upwards of
100 patrons a day. Most are foreigners -
especially homesick students - or people
thinking about getting wired themselves,
mainly white-collar workers from joint-
venture companies. For Chinese college
kids, the prices are astronomical: a Y100
(US$12) deposit up-front, then Y30 an
hour, plus Y15 for every 10 minutes of
Shanghai's East China
Computer Company sells
both hardware and
Net access, Manager
Jing Hailing (top left)
displays a brochure for
China InfoHighway,
anew online service,
Beijing computer game
fan Xiao Ma (below) has
more than 1(K) CD-ROMs.
A newcomer to the
Internet, he says he
spends most of his online
time in chat rooms.
Opposite: highway
construction in Shanghai;
bicycle porters in
Beijing's Zhongguancun
electronics district who
charge by weight to move
stacks of new equipment
overtime. Tutorials from Zhuang Dundi
are available at Y40 an hour; drinks are
Y25 each. At this rate, an hour of mind¬
less Net escapism plus a couple of Cokes
will consume 10 percent of the average
Chinese student's already spartan monthly
budget.
Those limits don't bother cafe manager
Bai Jinghong, who has the official line
down pat:
Absolute freedom is an impossibility. It
would create anarchy. To censor harmful
things doesn't just ensure that the Internet
can develop in a healthy fashion; it will
also ensure stability for China. I think
Singapore has the right approach. They
have been energetic in their development
of the Net and tireless in managing iL
Their tough line is worthy of emula tion;
a laissez-faire attitude is destructive and
must be rejected.
At a friend's on-campus apartment, a
15-year-old boy who attends a prestigious
Beijing middle school talked about his
experience with the Net:
/ have the advantage of Superhigh way
driving on public gas ' - 1 go online
through my mother's work unit , which
subscribes to ChinaNet. If I had to pay for
Internet access myself, my parents would
murder me .
Tm no Net-insect - Pve only been at it a
few months, Hey, Tm only in my third year
of middle school, and my English sucks .
There's people around
who are really into
surfing - all I can do
is bumble around ,
though l do find some
good stuff by chance.
Sure, l could get
onto the real Internet
by ringing a Hong
Kong or Taiwan
access provider The
work unit wouldn’t be
able to tell who was
ringing out , but if I
stayed online for very
long it'd cost a for¬
tune in international
phone bills , and my
family would have to
pay My mom would
kill me for sure.
I suppose the
NetWall is all about
keeping pornography
out of the coun try.
They've blocked
things like Playboy for example , but that's
hardly going to stop you. If you really
want to find stuff, then you'll get through
the wall - you just have to know how .
Anyway there are things that are much
worse than Playboy, and it's easy to get
access through sites in northern Europe
or Japan. Once you hit upon one f you
just take a trip round the neighborhood
through links they provide , and you've
got yourself a gold mine.
But porn on the Internet is a bore , all
static images or small-frame videos. It's
not nearly as much fun as watching a
good video. As for Reactionary propaganda /
I'm just not interested in it, I don't even
go looking.
SHANGHAI STYLE
Shanghai has always been China's cos¬
mopolitan entrepot. It's also where the
virtuous realities of Comrade S and talk
about Singapore models give way to the
down-to-earth facts of market forces and
resourceful practicalities.
Pan Weimin, a thirtysomething electri¬
cal engineering graduate from Shanghai's
prestigious Fudan University, runs the
day-to-day operations of the PaCity Com¬
puter Company, which makes and sells
computers and peripherals.
The aim of going on the Net is to be able
to communicate and exchange with other
people or engage in business . It's a two-
way highway If the Net becomes a na tion al
net, limited to a certain culture , then
what's the long-term use of getting wired?
Pan practices what he preaches. To
promote its machines, PaCity runs a hare-
bones “cafe” with eight online computers
in Putuo, the heart of Shanghai's elec¬
tronics industry.
People can come and use the equipment
for free - it could never survive as a caf$
anyway if we tried to live off our cus¬
tomers. But there's another thing: if we
started charging, we'd have to get every
user. ; casual or not, to register with China
Telecom and the FSB, As is, we can pretend
we're demonstrating our computers and
training potential buyers. So were free of
control. Otherwise , both the police and the
entertainment bureaucracy would be on
our backs.
There's nothing he can do, of course,
about China Telcom's filtering. And what¬
ever kind of loopholes he or others can
find are a long way from letting real Net
genies out of the bottle:
When push comes to shove, the author¬
ities don't have to restrict themselves to
imposing a NetWall around China. They
can use tried and true traditional meth¬
ods: one administrative order fi'om on
high and everything can be shut down.
It's simple and effective.
BRAVE NEW NET
It should not surprise anyone that the
Chinese authorities see the Net's oppor¬
tunities, along with its threats. Time and
again, the 20th century has proven the
value of information technology for
building a heaven for bureaucrats - or
for secret police. For Communist Party
WIRED JUNE 1997
070
cadres, that means a network devoted to
the transmission of party directives, gov¬
ernment orders, and local bureaucratic
folderol - in other words, an intranet.
The ever- vigilant PSB already has one,
linking it to every major hotel and guest
house where foreigners stay* The minute
you register at your five-star joint-venture
hotel. Comrade X and his associates know
you’re there*
Elsewhere, such efforts are still mostly
works in progress. In Guangdong prov¬
ince, for instance, few local-level party
offices have the bandwidth - meaning
more than a single phone line - to keep
their computers permanently online. So
headquarters first has to telephone to say
that a document is on the way, then local
officials turn on their modem to receive
it, along with the relevant party secretary’s
seal of office - suitably encrypted - and
signature. Clunky and primitive it may
be, but it works. And an infrastructure
that will wire the whole province is well
under way - Communist Party offices
first, of course*
One university computer specialist we
talked to in Guangzhou has been called in
to help with several of what he waggishly
calls “DocuMets”:
The bureaucrats don't give a damn
about the Net or connecting with the out¬
side world . What everyone is really getting
into - as long as they have the money to
do it - is establishing their own local net¬
works, When they receive a telex from
Beijing, they get their secretaries to type
it into the computer and then use the
DocuNet to distribute it . Ft's the latest in
paperless offices, and they want it
MONEY TALKS
There’s an old saying in south China:
“The heavens are high and the Emperor
is far away.” From the late 1970s - the
dawn of the post- Mao era - people in the
areas of Guangdong province bordering
on Hong Kong were among the first main¬
land Chinese to glimpse the outside world
through Deng Xiaoping’s then-new “Open
Door.” They were also the first to be able
to start turning off Central People’s Broad¬
casting and tuning in to the British col¬
ony’s televised version of capitalism’s
decadent charms.
Will the Net follow a similar path? One
affluent electronics buff in Guangzhou,
the provincial capital, is looking for new
opportunities after making a killing in
the last few years selling computers made
with pirated processors from Taiwan, He
offers a classically hedged south China
viewpoint:
You only have to think back to how
things were in the early 1980s, Then a
major political issue was the direction you
pointed your TV antenna - toward Hong
Kong or inland. The struggle went on for
years - the police carried out door-to-door
checks , people were ordered to pull down
their aerials, and party members were
warned they'd be expelled if they watched .
Then underground factories that produced
signal boosters mushroomed r and soon
everyone was watching Hong Kong TV
without a visible, external aerial. It
“People will just have to
accept that the government
blocks some things. If the
foreign media makes a big
stink about it, don't worry,
it will pass. The people
interested in the Net's
commercial possibilities
will carry on regardless.
Let's face it: Be it China or
America, the government's
voice is not as loud as that
of business. Those who are
willing to put up the money
will have the last word."
became such a farce that in the end the
au thorities simply gave up.
But these days, it's not only this side
that is different, TV stations in Hong Kong
have been changing. They want to reach
the massive market that covers the whole
Pearl River Delta. And to get that , they are
making compromises about content - they
won't show anything that's too provoca¬
tive. IPs the nature of business; if you
want it, you have to make concessions .
If the Net's going to be a success in
China, people will just ha ve to accept the
fact that the Chinese government blocks
some things. If the foreign media makes
a big stink about it, don't worry ; it'll pass.
The people interested in the Net's commer¬
cial possibilities will carry on regardless.
Let's force it: Be it China or America , the
government's voice is not as loud as that
of business. Those who are willing to put
up the money will have the last word.
THE GREAT NETWALL
The computer cordon sanitaire that Chin¬
ese authorities are trying to build around
China is called the fanghuo qiang, or
“firewall,” a direct translation from Eng¬
lish. But a more popular phrase for it is
wangguan , literally “NctWall” - a name
harking back to an earlier effort to repel
foreign invaders. As every Chinese school
kid knows, the original Great Wall failed
in its basic mission (though it did better
as a communication avenue). Will its
digital successor fare any better?
The PSB’s Comrade X sees both the
scope of the problem and the need for
what strategists call “defense in depth”:
Nationwide regulations are being for-
mulated, but because these will involve so
many other laws and areas - advertising,
news, and so on - it will be impossible for
us to draw up comprehensive legislation
in the short term. At the moment it is up
to the ISP and the individual to be respon¬
sible for the regulation of newsgroups and
the leaking of state secrets .
A professor at a Guangzhou electronics
college has a different view:
The Net Wall is something bom of a typi¬
cally Chinese mindset. Perhaps it's just a
matter of face-saving. People in the m ►
mm
WIRED JUNE 1 9 9 7
FIREWALL
< us government fed they've got their
backs to the wall They re not stupid. They
know fall well how viciously everyone
denounces them every' day in private .
DIGITAL ISLANDS
In the People's Republic, coded commu¬
nications are second nature, developed
over years of mass surveillance, people
reading other people's mail and diaries,
tapping phones, and generally being inqui¬
sitive about your affairs. The idea that the
walls have ears doesn't shock anyone.
In conversation, for instance, com¬
ments about the weather often carry a
political subtext. Low temperatures and
storms indicate that the shit has hit the
fan; extreme heat can mean that things
are precarious for the individual, their
company, or inside the government. The
Chinese language's rich imagery and tele¬
graphic allusions can make it hard for
censors to discern subversive messages
from poetic flights of fancy.
Not that it stops them from trying.
The authorities have seen what can
happen when the information revolution
takes a swipe at its socialist predecessor.
Last summer, during a furor - initially
encouraged by the authorities - over
Japan's occupation of the historically
Chinese Diaoyu (Senkaku) Islands, students
used the national university network to
organize demonstrations. They also trans¬
mitted news of the protests, much of
which was going unreported in the ner¬
vous official media. In this case, the cen¬
sorship was as crude as it was effective:
the most prominent online activist was
quickly banished to remote Qinghai
Province, and for 10 days, all university
access to newsgroups was shut down -
those in English (favored by scientists)
and in Chinese alike.
The move coincided with an ongoing
general crackdown on dissent. Semi¬
independent journals and newspapers
have been banned, writers and intellec¬
tuals harassed. The few active dissidents
who have managed to stay out of jail (or,
more commonly, exile) have had to be
even more than usually draimspect about
their contacts with the outside world.
One who manages is the controversial
environmentalist and investigative histo¬
rian Dai Qing. Frequently detained by the
authorities, she sees the Net as a lifeline
to friends and supporters outside China.
“Whenever I get back to my apartment,
the first thing I do is check my email. In
Chinese there's a saying: The ends of the
earth can be brought close to you,' That's
what email allows me to feel. To be in
constant contact with people throughout
the world gives me a sense of security”
Since the crackdown, the Net - however
problematic - has also become one of the
few remaining sources of unofficial news.
The main online Chinese-language infor¬
mation sources - the Hong Kong and
Taiwan presses, and the China News
Digest - are among the NetWalTs high-
priority targets. Rut anyone with access
to the Net and a little skill can find uncen¬
sored information - even something as
simple as weather-oriented email mes¬
sages - that fill in the blank spots created
by the authorities, whether regarding dis¬
sidents, rumors surrounding the demise
of Deng Xiaoping, or Islamic separatist
bombings in downtown Beijing.
Other tiny digital islands exist - an
online magazine for Beijing's “unofficial”
art scene, run by two expat Japanese, for
example, and another site where a small
THIS SUMMER
RAY GUN GOES TOTALLY OUT OF CONTROL
RAY GUN OUT OF CONTROL IS A 240 PAGE BOOK
FEATURING GRAPHIC REMIXES OF
NEW DESIGN. ILLUSTRATION.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND WRITING FROM THE AUTHORITIES AT
RAY GUN
INCLUDING BIKINI, STICK. BLAH BLAH BLAH, HUH,
AND RAY GUN MAGAZINES.
NEW ESSAYS BY DAVID BOWIE,
- WILLIAM GIBSON. MICHAEL STIPE
AND R.E.M. DESIGNER CHRIS BILHEIMER,
- RAY GUN PUBLISHER MARVIN SCOTT JARRETT,
R AY-&U-M-E D IT QR4 AL- DIRECTOR MARK BLACKWELL,
EYE MAGAZINE EDITOR RICK POYNER,
- AND RAY GUN MANAGING EDITOR DEAN KUIPERS
EXPLORE THE CHANGING, FLUID INTERACTION BETWEEN
JOURNALISM AND GRAPHIC BE-SI6M.
WITNESS A GLOBAL GRAPHIC TAKEOVER
JUNE 1997
Ray Gun - Out Of Control
Book design by Substance and John Holden
FIREWALL
group of mainland gays sends out news
about their lives and activities to the
wider world. How long this will last is
anyone’s guess; Chinese authorities often
let things happen until problems arise.
As Comrade X put it in Ills gnomic style,
“You make a problem for us, and we’ll
make a law for you ”
JUDGMENT DAY
It would be easy enough in China to radi¬
cally limit the Net’s spread. But companies
like China InfoHighway have a more
focused agenda: turning information tech¬
nology to their own, avowedly chauvinistic,
advantage. It’s not official policy, but it’s
close. And it certainly reflects the attitude
oT thinly disguised nationalist grievance
that informs so much of China’s current
relations - the debates over Hong Kong,
Taiwan, and Tibet, for starters - with the
rest of the world.
Here’s another serve from Xia Hong,
China InfoHigh way’s PR man:
The Internet has been an important
technical innovator, but we need to add
another element , and that is control The
new generation of information superhigh ¬
way needs a traffic control center. It needs
highway patrols; users will require driv¬
ing licenses. These are the basic require¬
ments for any controlled environment.
All Net users must conscientiously abide
by government laws and regulations. If
Net users wish to enter or leave a national
boundary they must s by necessity go
through customs and immigration. They
will not be allowed to take state secrets
out , nor will they be permitted to bring
harmful information in.
As we stand on the cusp of the new cen¬
tury, we need to - and are justified in want¬
ing to - challenge America's dominant
position. Cutting-edge Western technology
and the most ancient Eastern culture will
be combined to create the basis for dialog
in the coming century, i In the 21st century, ;
the boundaries will be redrawn . The world
is no longer the spiritual colony of America.
Judgment Day for the Internet is fast
approaching. At most it can keep going for
three to Jive years. But the end is nigh; the
sun is setting in the West , and the glories
of the past are gone forever.
China InfoHighway is a major player
in what its brochures call “the Chinese
information supermarkets Its managing
director, a well-connected woman named
Zhang Shuxin, isn’t shy about her ambi¬
tion to be the “Bill Gates of China,” But
when we asked other Internet specialists
- a technician at Beijing University, the
manager of China Telecom, even Com¬
rade X - what they thought about Xia
Hong’s boasting, they replied with varia¬
tions on the same answer: “Those people
are completely out of touch with reality”
But then reality in modern China has
always been a tentative concept.
Zhou Hongwei is a senior engineer with
Shanghai’s Ge’er Electronics Corporation,
He uses his spare time to help local aca¬
demics get online:
A few years ago everyone was asking,
'Have you started up your own company
yet?' Then it was , 'Do you have a driving
license?1 followed by What model com¬
puter did you get?7 Last year the big thing
was f Are you into multimedia yet?7 Today
it's, Are you wired?7
No one realty cares if you are actually
wired. Forget about what the Net is for
and what U might become. People only
want to show their friends that i?s ►
Windows to the sole
Sidewalk
Universal
(800) FOR TE VA wwwtevasandais.cam Eastern Mountain Sports Journeys Track h Trail
FIREWALL
< 177 they've done the right thing and
got themselves wired .
ROADS AHEAD
China in the 1990s is a country embarked
on what some local economists call “the
acquisition of primitive capital ,” Indivi¬
duals, companies, and state enterprises
are ail vying for advantage in the rough-
and-ready atmosphere of a unique histor¬
ical moment: simultaneous industrial and
information revolutions in the oldest, most
populous nation on earth.
For all their unabashed efforts to con¬
trol the Net in China, the authorities and
their entrepreneurial offspring can also
see its potential, at least for generating
profits. That’s one reason the most stri¬
dent antifo reign rhetoric comes not from
pragmatic technocrats like Comrade X,
but from fledgling local capitalists and
professional xenophobes, who have their
own obvious reasons for wanting anything
foreign - including potential competition
- kept in its place.
Last December, the conservative Bei¬
jing journal Strategy and Management
published a commentary by Yang Xue-
shan, head of the State Information Cen¬
ter’s Capital Investment Office:
Following the end of the Cold War,
certain developed nations (meaning the
United States and its allies) are deter¬
mined to protect their own interests by
labeling themselves as internationalists.
They pretend to be the benefactors of all
mankind , while constantly expanding
their sphere of influence and attempting
to con tain the development of others , , , ,
They want to envelop everything in their
information umbrella.
Paranoid nationalism is not just good
politics - it’s a useful way of garnering
support for homegrown solutions. One of
the most prominent of those is the China
Wide Web, a joint venture of the official
New China News Agency and China
Internet Cor¬
poration, a
“patriotic”
Hong Kong
company.
Inaugurated
last October,
the CWW
(www. china,
com/) is creat¬
ing a nation¬
wide Chinese
commercial
network, all
guaranteed
spiritually pol¬
lution-free.
Meanwhile,
much-watched
digital model
country
Singapore is
blazing a path
with Singapore
One, an exelu-
till MILj U VI VI 1 1114 I M llUllllii
sive “superna¬
tional intranet”
to be launched later this year, with all the
advantages of the Internet and none of
the “problems ” The digital gated commu¬
nity, infohighwray as one-way street. It
won’t pass muster in San Francisco or
Sydney, but that’s no reason it can’t work.
For now, the Net in China will remain
a privileged realm, enjoyed by the well
heeled and well educated, by foreigners,
and by the government itself. The cabal of
policy makers that is advising the national
leadership - Public Security, China Tele¬
com, politically well-connected entrepre¬
neurs - is by no stretch of the imagination
enlightened, digitally or otherwise. Inter¬
nal debate will continue - which organi¬
zations or individuals will be allowed to
get wired, which will be refused, what
those who are online will be allowed to
For a lucky few, the
Net offers escape
from an information
desert. In his Beijing
apartment (top), one
clever surfer runs
CNN Interactive
round the clock.
Below, at the Keep in
Touch Bar -a one-
computer Internet
cafe- artist Tao Ling
and friends discuss
whether to burn the
bills he ran up regis-
terinn a domain namp
see, and who will profit. The one certainty,
given the headstrong Chinese bureaucracy
and the Maoist mentality that spawned it,
is that China’s adaptations of the Net will
be unique, and probably bizarre by West¬
ern standards,
China’s Open Door policies have had
momentous, mostly uncalculated conse¬
quences, But that doesn't mean that the
China of the future is going to look more
and more like us. It is going to continue
to look like China - and will have the
wherewithal to do so. As China gets
stronger and more wired, it will still be
limited by intellectual narrowness and
Sinocentric bias. Pluralism and the open-
mindedness that comes with it - the
worldly curiosity of previous great powers
and the idealism that often supports it -
simply are not present. More to the point,
they are not about to be encouraged,
DARK GUESTS
Many Chinese computer terms are homo¬
phono us transpositions from English, The
expression for hacker is heike, literally
“dark guest ” As travelers in China’s Net
world, we were sometimes regarded as
slightly suspicious visitors. One army gen¬
eral’s son - himself a classic nerd who
runs his own computer graphics company
- said point-blank, “What are you people
doing here in China? Foreigners have
never done us any good.”
He fell silent when reminded that with¬
out his Western glasses, designer running
shoes, computer technology, and command
of English, his Sinocentric world might be
far more narrow and lackluster.
A young Beijing woman who works as the
night manager at a Sino-Japanese joint-
venture hotel whiles the hours away
“roaming at will” on her office computer.
With access to foreign currency, she’s an
avid online consumer who’s already used
the Net to make a few modest purchases
from abroad - a la mode sportswear and
assorted accessories.
They’re the latest fashion, and it's worth
it. Of course f there are things / can’t, afford,
like a swimming pool or a circus elephant
or real designer clothes . But there are
people out there who can. I don’t have the
wherewithal now, so I know f have to work
harder and make more money
And what about someone without a
credit card? She was honestly bemused:
If you don’t have a credit card, what
in heaven’s name are you doing on the
Internet in the first place? ■ ■ ■
WIRED JUNE 1997
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□ so
WIRED JUNE 1997
HONG KONG
^ 151 Might those restrictions
apply to electronic rights as well?
"It's entirely likely/' says lames
McGregor, director of Hong Kong-
based business consultancy L D*
McGregor Ltd." So me where down
the road, China could make use
of what technical means it has to
restrict the Internet/'
Those "technical means" could
take many forms, ranging from
a Singapore-style proxy server
approach, in which ISPs are forced
to weed out Web sites the Chin¬
ese government deems offen¬
sive, to filtering of financial news
from sources such as Dow Jones,
Bloomberg, and Reuters by the
government-controlled Xinhua
News Agency, as is the case in
mainland China.
Hong Kong's government
may have already employed high
tech tactics. Last October, Wang
Dan, a noted activist involved in
the Tiananmen Square civil rights
protests, was sentenced to 1 1
years in Chinese prison. Hong
Kong radio broadcasts about
the sentencing were posted on
the Internet for worldwide dis¬
semination.
But for two days, Internet users
overseas complained that sound
was inaudible or blocked entirely.
Says Ben Yoong, a Hong Kong
Web site designer, "It may have
been technical, but the wide¬
spread suspicion (that the inter¬
ference was intentional) tells you
something about how concerned
people are/'
Yoong believes suppression of
free speech on the Internet may
begin with monitoring of both
private and public email and may
lead to use of email records as
court evidence. "People will really
be scared if one or two of their
email messages or their comments
in online forums get brought into
the courts/' he adds.
FINANCIAL JITTERS
Such privacy concerns as these
have caused uneasiness in Hong
Kong's network of multimillion-
dollar businesses, particularly
those in the financial community.
"Certain banks, such as those in
the ELI, will not transact with
institutions that don't observe
certain regulations with regard
to privacy,'' says Susan Schoen-
feld, president of Advisors for
International Media Asia Ltd.
David Carse, deputy chief exec¬
utive of the Hong Kong Monetary
Authority, claims there is no indi¬
cation that privacy safeguards
concerning financial data will be
diminished; nevertheless, there's
a chill in the air.
"When China makes noises
about changing laws, it throws
everybody into orbit," says
Simon Murray, executive chair
of Deutsche Bank for the Asia-
Pacific region /'To banks, privacy
is like gold dust. If there's any¬
thing that interferes with the way
in which we do business, and the
rights we have to do our busi¬
ness, people will say, Fine, we'll
go somewhere else/'
Result: a quiet flight of capital
from Hong Kong has occurred as
companies depart for more open
Asian business environments
such as Singapore and Malaysia.
For those that remain, quiet
acceptance and self -censorship
may ultimately prevail. "Our posi¬
tion is, Don't ask, don't tell," says
Charles Mok, general manager of
HKNet, Hong Kong's fifth-largest
ISP. "People aren't avoiding the
issue, but they probably don't see
the need to ask China if it's going
to regulate us more/'
The promise of gaining access
to one of the largest consumer
markets in the world may stifle
any potential criticism from the
local business community. One
intoxicating attraction is the
mainland's telecommunications
market, which has yet to open
except to equipment suppliers.
When free trade begins, Hong
Kong telcos will be salivating for
the business and will be poten¬
tially more amenable to meeting
Beijing's stringent demands for
Internet control.
"If the Chinese cracked down
on the Internet, the average busi¬
nessman would not move out,"
McGregor says/These are not
such dramatic things that com¬
panies would be affected in terms
of profitability."
Selective monitoring is already
business-as-usual for foreign firms
doing business with China/'The
ISPs in this town are used to work¬
ing with censorship regulations/'
says Joe Sweeney, vice president
of marketing for Asia On-Line,
one of Hong Kong's largest ISPs.
"China doesn't need to apply any
laws - they're already here/'
Chinese censors would face a
daunting technical challenge if
they tried to monitor all of the
Internet traffic passing through
Hong Kong/'The manpower
ease Chinese monitoring.
Some longtime Hong Kong resi¬
dents believe that merely the hint
of an organized electronic protest
could precipitate a devastating
crackdown. Last September, for
instance, student activists in Bei¬
jing and Hong Kong staged a
coordinated gathering over the
Internet, challenging Chinese
claims toward the Diaoyu Islands,
possession of which is under hot
dispute between China, Taiwan,
and Japan,
This electronic organizing
made the Chinese government
uneasy, and it later blocked
For the ordinary people who remain after China moves in,
quiet acceptance and sell-censorship may ultimately prevail.
needs would be extraordinary,"
says a local ISP's technical sup¬
port manager. Mok and others
argue that Hong Kong's sprawling
telecommunications infrastruc¬
ture - including four major telcos,
more than 40 ISPs, about half a
dozen cellular providers, and a
wealth of private networks -
would make it impossible for the
government to enforce the use
of proxy servers. However, the
Chinese could limit Internet use
through licensing, as they've
done on the mainland. The city's
Internet market is dominated by
only about a half dozen ISPs, such
as Hongkong Telecom, and even
such market leaders as Asia On-
Line expect the ISPs to consoli¬
date. Such a shrinkage would
some of Hong Kong's most active
Web sites. With new restricted
rights of public assembly in Hong
Kong, more Internet-facilitated
protests could potentially follow,
and that could be precisely what
it takes to make China close its
fist around the flow of informa¬
tion into the newly integrated
territories.
"It's just the perception of a
threat," says Lay. "But the ques¬
tion still remains. What would
trigger such an action? If the
Chinese perceive things to be
getting out of control, then all
bets are off. There is no reason to
think that the Chinese are going
to be threatened by Hong Kong.
But if they are, we're all in deep
trouble."! ■ ■
WIRED JUNE 1997
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THE NETIZEN
+ se he says* Such comments are reassur¬
ing, but like any veteran bureaucrat, Hundt
seems eager to hud a middle ground
between the telcos and the Net* Thus, he
has also offered his own solution* Right
now, residential phone lines are cheap
because federal and state agencies have
mandated increases in the cost of long dis¬
tance calls and premium services like call
waiting to subsidize basic dial-tone access
for everyone. Hundt has suggested remov¬
ing these subsidies from second phone
lines. In the absence of local-loop competi¬
tion, his proposal would potentially double
the price of a second line* But it would also
give the telcos less to grumble about*
Hundt has only one vote on the four-
member Federal Communications Com¬
mission (the fifth spot remains vacant at
the time of this writing), but other commis¬
sioners seem to agree with his position*
“We’re going to walk very carefully so as
not to impede progress or competition ”
insists Commissioner Susan Ness* Indeed,
when the group held a preliminary vote on
access charges last December, it ruled that
Internet providers should not he subject to
access charges of around 3 cents a minute*
Since today’s system is so screwed up, the
agency said* “We see no reason to extend
this regime to an additional class of users,
especially given the potentially detrimental
effects on the growth of the still-evolving
information services industry.”
The Net had - once again - found an
improbable ally in the FCC* But the love-
fest may be short-lived* The ruling left
the door open for the commission to
impose access charges of less than 3 cents,
and the telcos are now asking for a penny
a minute.
Inside the Beltway, the buzz is that the
FCC won’t impose new access fees any¬
time soon. But no matter what the com¬
missioners decide, the losing side is likely
to take its grievances to the Senate’s Com¬
merce, Science, and Transportation Com¬
mittee, which oversees the agency and
could overrule its decision. The Commerce
Committee’s new chair, Senator John
McCain (R-Arizona), harbors little sym¬
pathy for the telcos - or their lobbyists*
(See “The McCain Mutiny” page 122*)
After presiding over a recent hearing on
universal service, McCain began spread¬
ing the word that he opposes new access
charges* “The claims that are being made
by the telcos are somewhat exaggerated ”
he says. “I’m persuaded that online access
isn’t nearly the burden they are complain¬
ing about.” McCain’s assessment is not
universally shared - Alaska’s Senator Ted
Stevens, a senior Republican on the com¬
mittee, said in March that Internet ser¬
vices should be regulated as telephone
companies, and forced to pay some form
of access charge or universal service fee*
The ad hoc alliance
All of which means that the peculiar syn¬
ergy that exists between grassroots Inter¬
net users and high tech corporations
remains as important as ever* In the face
of the telcos7 onslaught, netizens are join¬
ing ranks with business interests to lobby
the government and protect the Net.
Although the flood of angry email that
stuffed the FCC’s in-box was a chaotic,
word-of-mouth effort, it worked wonders
- and effectively changed the course of the
debate in DC. “I think people in Washing¬
ton recognize that the 300,000-raessage
deluge wras just the tip of the iceberg ,” says
Paul Misener, Intel’s chief (and only) tele¬
com lobbyist and coordinator of the Inter¬
net Access Coalition.
Yet in a very real way, the digital nation
had misidentified its foe. As a rule, Wash¬
ington’s bureaucrats are not power-crazed
authoritarians; most are reactive crea¬
tures who simply respond to demonstra¬
tions of influence and power. Bell Atlantic,
PacBell, Nynex, et alia leaned hard on the
FCC for access fees, and the agency react¬
ed in its own instinctively bureaucratic
way* The high tech community responded
by forming its own ad hoc coalition to
pressure the FCC, and thousands of Inter¬
net users chimed in to express their col¬
lective dismay. Of course, the best way to
win not just the battle but the war may
be to remove the commission’s power to
regulate the Net altogether. Still, so far
the real threat to netizens has come from
complacent telcos and their legions of
starched-collar lobbyists, not the FCC*
The distinction is important, because the
old rule of thumb stiff bolds true: The
enemy of our enemy may occasionally
prove to be our friend* m m u
EleH
WIRED JUNE 1997
NEGROPONTE
Message: 48
Date: 6.1 .97
From: <nicholas@media.mit.edu>
To: <!r@wi red.com >
Subject:
2B1
There is a new force in the world: the growth
of cyberspace, inherent in this force is a
breakdown of barriers. Everyone talks about
crossing barriers of geography, gender, and
culture. But the most important barrier is
perhaps the least appreciated; the barrier of
age. Empowering kids is a double whammy
because they're the ones who will most
effectively break down the other barriers
as well. The children of the world are critical
to achieving a united world.
Those of us who grew up in multiracial
societies are likely to be more racially unprej¬
udiced than our parents .1 see the same dif¬
ference in people younger than me, who
grew up in a more gender-enlightened era;
many just cannot understand how much of
an issue gender was in my time. I bet the
kids of tomorrow will have the same feeling
had just published MWsforrm. Papert's
theme oF'teaching children thinking" was
a natural complement to The World Chal¬
lenge. And, with the initial backing of the
then-wealthy OPEC, these crazy ideas started
to make sense. Saudi leader Ahmed Zaki
Yamani delivered a powerful address on
human development that fall in Vienna.
Paraphrased, he said, don't give a poor man
fish, give him a fishing rod. The leap from
a fishing rod to a personal computer was,
for some of us, easy.
The center's work focused on the use of
computers for primary education in devel¬
oping nations. The first site was a school
outside Dakar, 5enegal. This small experi¬
ment was just terrific; the kids had most fun
teaching the principal. Kids from the jungle
learned faster than kids from the city.
What sense is there in providing
computers to children in nations where
there is inadequate food, clothing,
and medicine? The short answer: lots.
about nationalistic thinking. In fact, we are
looking at a generation that will feel about
culture the way most of us today feel about
race and gender - identity and unity, being
individual and plural at the same time.
What's wrong with this picture is that
more than 50 percent of the 1.2 billion chil¬
dren ages 6 to 11 have never even placed
a phone call. Yet the suggestion to give
the kids of the world access to technology
raises an obvious question: What sense is
there in providing computers and Internet
access to children in nations where there
is inadequate food, clothing, and medicine?
The short answer: lots.
Deja vu
In 1981, French president Francois Mitterand
gave author Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
the mandate to establish a World Center for
Computation and Human Development. The
idea was based on Servan-Schreiber's book
The World Challenge. Simply stated, develop¬
ing nations should and could leapfrog the
industrialization processandjump into the
trade of bits, instead of atoms.
What gave this idea substance and credi¬
bility was the work of Seymour Papert, who
The second location was Colombia; it had
the full personal commitment of President
Belisario Betancur Cuartas, For a short per¬
iod, this outrageously bold idea looked like
it was going to be the beginning of some¬
thing very big and important.
It was not. Within months, the original
mission was pushed aside in favor of addres¬
sing more immediate needs in France,
where, after all, the center was based. Within
less than six months, the "world challenge"
was replaced with "France's need*- instal¬
ling a national fiber-optic system.
Timing
The 1 981 Parts initiative was way ahead of
its time. Even if It had not unraveled for other
reasons, it would have failed because of the
absence of global telecommunications and
the rarity of personal computers, The IBM
PC had not even been introduced in Europe.
Today, the timing is right.Two major forces
fuel this timeliness: worldwide awareness
and use of the Internet and the spread of
personal computers into the lives of chil¬
dren - at school and at home.
Because of these forces, a group of us has
created a nonprofit organization called 2B1,
whose purpose is to bring the digital world
to kids in those places least likely to provide
access to it. The idea is not to go country by
country, but to target the world as a whole.
Sounds cuckoo, but it isn't, because the Net
itself and the children using it now are very
much part of the solution.
in parallel, the MIT Media Lab is also
focusing on children, learning, and human
development. The scientific and technical
questions It faces range from language
translation to storytelling to cultural under¬
standing to the roles of nonverbal language.
Developing digerati
On July 1 7, MIT and 2 B1 a re cohosti ng a
five-day workshop that will bring together
people who have taken bold initiatives in
bringing computers to children who live
in technologically isolated places. For exam¬
ple, teachers who have defied the logic that
you need to provide more chalk before you
bring a computer into a primary classroom.
Or social activists who have brought com¬
puters to street children who don't have
schools at all. But especially those who have
found ways even more Imaginative to bring
children into cyberspace.
Check out www.2b Torg/. We will pay
travel, room, and board expenses for as
many people as we can afford, with a strong
priority given to getting at least one or two
individuals from every developing nation.
Do you know somebody who should attend?
Our goals for the meeting include devel¬
oping a 2B1 plan of action, collaborating
with existing groups, and establishing a
major granting program of hardware, tele¬
communications systems, and know-how.
Feels big? You bet it does. But just like the
distributed Internet, this too can grow. In
fact, the Net is the encouraging force. It
is both global and popular - and what we
did not have in 1981 . ■ m m
28 1 is a nonprofit foundation , whose presi¬
dent is Peter Cawley (peter@2bl.org), vice
chair and chief scientist is Seymour Papert
(seymour@2b1 .org), and director of product
development and interface design is Dimitri
Negroponte (dimitri@2b1 .org). Other partici¬
pants include myself, Saj Nicole Joni, Tom
Grant, Rodrigo Arboleda Hataby and others
mentioned at the Web site ,
Next Issue: Digital Obesity
WIRED JUNE 19 9 7
□ 8 □
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